In what could be the last grant of its type for a long time, feds give Boston enough money to buy 125 electric school buses

For a variety of political reasons, there has been a lot of time, money and energy put into electrifying transit buses. The problem is that the route characteristics of transit buses make them much harder to electrify. There are significant hurdles since agencies often need to buy more electric buses to provide the same level of service, and existing transit buses, which are often CNG (minimal local particulate emissions) or modern diesel-hybrid transmissions, have low particulate emissions anyway (which is what matters at a local scale, the CO2 benefit of a bus is that it isn't 40 people driving a car).

Transit buses are difficult to electrify because they need to provide service all day long while making frequent stops. The range in miles is not particularly important compared to the range in hours of cold weather operation: frequently open doors mean that in cold weather, 50% of the energy needed to heat a bus is used for cabin heat, or more. Diesel engines are only about 40% efficient, so there's plenty of waste heat to heat the cabin without impacting range. Electric motors are 100% efficient, but to heat the bus requires a lot of electricity. Since buses need a lot of electricity in a short amount of time, a bus yard requires as much electricity as a medium-size town, which doesn't come cheap.

So you wind up toting around a huge battery which you only fully need on the coldest days of the year or, even more idiotically, implementing electric buses with diesel heaters which, unlike diesel-hybrid buses, have no pollution controls, and have overall higher local particulate emissions (which, again, is really what matters for people who live near the buses) than the diesel buses they replace. Yes, really. You get lower CO2 emissions at the expense of more capital outlay, more particulate emissions, and worse service. It's a win-lose-lose-lose!

School buses, on the other hand, are much better candidates for electrification. They're only in use for 4-8 hours per day, in 2-4 hour chunks. They can be charged in between service and heated up while connected to power, and then only need to operate their route and heat the cabin for a few hours before a midday recharge. They only have one door and often only make a few stops which minimizes the loss of heat during operation. There's enough time to trickle-charge the already-smaller batteries in the midday and overnight since the buses are really only in use for a few hours in morning and evening (hours which map to the highest energy use and cost times of day; while transit buses do see peak service, there is much more service at other times of day, especially post-pandemic).

If the T had been run by competence in the Baker admin rather than run amok, they could have avoided taking federal funding to buy a fleet of more-polluting electric buses and building the infrastructure related to it (they got federal funding for this, but applying for money to expand the trolleybus network instead would have had significantly more benefit and not required buses with dirty diesel heaters), which we'll all be paying for for decades.

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How much was actually paid for each bus.

A grant for X dollars to buy Y of a big ticket item may also have included funding for associated costs. For the previous grant for buses, it definitely included "charging infrastructure" (https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2024/01/massachusetts-sierra-c...) which would have eaten up some of that money. Maybe some of the funds went into staff training. We don't have the actual documents that would tell us all of that.

That press release also says it was for 50 buses and that Boston already had 20 electric buses. So somewhere the count is off. I'm guessing that Adam did not visit all of the bus yards and personally count up the number of electric buses in the city for this article though I'd be slightly impressed if he did!