This Pennsylvania school is saving big with solar and EV school buses
Solar panels and electric buses can boost school budgets while cutting emissions. Here’s how Steelton-Highspire School District put both to use.
www.canarymedia.com
This Pennsylvania school is saving big with solar and EV school buses
Solar panels and electric buses can boost school budgets while cutting emissions. Here’s how Steelton-Highspire School District put both to use.
By Jeff St. John
19 December 2024
Steelton-Highspire School District’s high school, where six electric school buses charge from the nearby 1.7-megawatt solar array. (Steelton-Highspire School District)
When Steelton-Highspire School District decided to go solar, it wasn’t because of climate altruism. It wasn’t sustainability goals that drove it to convert its six school buses from diesel to electric, either.
Instead, the 1,377-student district, located in a historic Pennsylvania steelmaking town where unemployment is high and tax revenue is low, has a simple guiding principle, according to Superintendent Mick Iskric Jr.: “We do things out of necessity. We’re broke.”
In the face of multi-million-dollar annual deficits, every dollar saved on electricity bills and bus-fueling costs can go a long way, he said. Luckily for Iskric and school administrators like him across the country, solar power and electric school buses can save money — as long as cash-strapped districts can find partners to help them cover the up-front costs.
That’s what Steelton-Highspire did. It worked with McClure Company, an energy services firm headquartered in nearby Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the district’s partner in previous energy-efficiency work. McClure set up a power purchase agreement (PPA) for a 1.7-megawatt solar array that covers 100 percent of the district’s annual electricity needs. Similar PPA structures have allowed thousands of school districts to access solar power that lowers their utility bills; Steelton-Highspire’s solar arrangement will save it about $3.6 million over the next 20 years.
As for the electric school buses, Steelton-Highspire is one of thousands of districts able to access federal rebates from a $5 billion program created by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That’s important for meeting the up-front expense of electric buses, which can be cheaper to operate but cost about three times as much as their diesel-fueled counterparts to purchase.
The district worked with its long-time transportation services contractor First Student to secure the $2.4 million clean school-bus rebate from the Environmental Protection Agency, and then again to build on-site charging stations to take advantage of the school’s lower-cost solar power. That helped avoid some of the unexpected costs and complexities that can block schools from getting electric school buses running even after getting grants to buy them.
“Fortunately for us, we were able to do the solar first,” Iskric said. “That took the electric load off our school, so we didn’t have to invest additional money to take on the charging of the electric school buses there.”
Getting the school solar and electric buses economics right
Solar and electric school buses are a winning combination for Steelton-Highspire — and the district isn’t alone in combining the two money-saving technologies.
As of the end of 2023, 433 school districts — 2.25 percent of the country’s total — had both solar installations and electric school buses on site or in their near-term deployment plans, according to data from nonprofit groups Generation180 and the World Resources Institute. Those districts had a cumulative solar capacity of 609 megawatts and commitments to deploy 4,556 electric school buses.
Although districts can save big with solar and electric school buses, there’s no guarantee — and local leaders need to be careful to make sure the math for these projects works out, said Tish Tablan, program director at Generation180. “Each technology alone can have its challenges to implement.”
Of the two, solar is generally more straightforward. “Most school districts are still skeptical this is a purely economic decision,” she said. But “in the last two years, 800 schools added solar arrays. These decisions have an economic benefit, otherwise they wouldn’t be happening.”
Still, school districts need to be “really careful when they talk about a PPA,” according to Greggory Kresge, senior manager of utility engagement and transportation electrification at the World Resources Institute.
Solar developers offering PPAs are “basically saying, ‘I’m going to be able to supply you this much power at this much cost, and it’s going to offset what you’d usually pay your electrical utility,’” he said. But whether that deal will pan out “depends on where you are and who your utility is.”
Steelton-Highspire School District managed to avoid a potentially bad outcome with its first efforts to go solar, said Jay Franklin, president of NRG Building Services, a Steelton-based electrical and construction contractor that worked with the district on the project.
“The school was actually going down the route of a power purchase agreement that appeared to be very detrimental to them,” he said. That deal overestimated the value of the clean energy credits the solar array would generate, as well as the likely increase in utility electric rates that the solar power would offset, he said. “We looked at it and said, ‘We don’t think this is a very good deal.’”
The district eventually struck a deal with McClure Company that was much more realistic on those terms, Franklin said. As a local company with long-standing relationships with school districts across the state, “They take a very long-term approach,” he said.
The return on investment for McClure wasn’t as high as what the first company would have gotten from its proposal, he noted. But McClure “knew it will benefit them, either with that customer in the long run, or with goodwill out in the marketplace.”
PPA terms tend to be closely held. Mark “JJ” Carnes, business manager at Steelton-Highspire School District, declined to reveal how much the district was paying for the solar power it’s getting, although he did say it’s “pennies compared to what the going rate is.”
That cheap solar power has helped improve the already attractive economics of electricity versus diesel fuel, making the math for EV buses much more attractive. The district expects to save about $20,000 per year thanks to its decision to electrify its bus fleet, Carnes said.
Having the solar next to the high school also helped the district and First Student work through a charging challenge, he said. First Student already had a diesel bus depot in the area, but the site didn’t have the electrical capacity required to outfit it with chargers for the EV buses.
Rather than ask the local utility to undertake the lengthy and potentially costly work of upgrading the depot’s electrical service, “it was natural to say, ‘OK, we have space here — and we have the solar array.’ Why would I pay the grid to charge these buses when there’s a 1.7 megawatt PV array sitting out back?”
Cheap solar power is a good way to improve not just the cost but also the carbon-cutting impact of switching to electric school buses, Kresge said. “If you can take that energy when it’s generated and put it back into batteries, you’re not only not burning diesel fuel in the bus, but you’re also not burning grid power, which also tends to be fossil-fuel driven in many locations.” In 2023, nearly 60 percent of Pennsylvania’s grid power came from fossil gas, and another 5 percent came from coal.
It’s not always the cheapest option, however. Some utilities offer special “time-of-use” rates to encourage customers to charge their EVs when demand for utility power is lower and avoid times when power demand is higher. Those rates may be cheaper than the price that schools are paying for their solar power, he said — and if those times line up with when electric school buses need to be charged, that’s probably a better deal.
It’s also possible that solar power may be worth more going back to the utility grid than it is going into buses, Franklin noted. The value of customer-owned solar power being sent back to the grid varies widely from state to state and utility to utility, and those values can change as policies shift. But it’s worth figuring out which is better when designing a solar-charging plan, he said.
On the other hand, using solar power to charge buses could help schools avoid demand charges, Kresge said. Those are extra costs based on big utility customers’ maximum draw from the power grid at any single point in time over the month or the year. Electric bus chargers can pull hundreds of kilowatts of power, and if they’re all charging at the same time, that can lead to a big demand spike.
“We’re seeing some school districts getting dinged with 150 percent of their previous electrical bill being made up of demand charges,” he said. Solar power flowing onto the same circuits that are powering bus chargers can reduce those demand spikes when the sun is shining.
Not all bus-recharging schedules align with maximum solar output, of course. School districts may also want to see if adding stationary batteries that can store solar or grid power to offset bus-charging loads at other times might be worth the extra cost compared with the risk of demand charges, Kresge said.
Solar, electric school buses, and batteries can also provide backup power, he noted. So-called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies can tap extra electricity from EV batteries to offset grid power consumption. With the right technology in place, they can also be used during blackouts to power lights, air conditioning, and heating for school buildings.
First Student has already started working on this kind of “microgrid” technology at projects like its solar and battery-enabled bus depot in New York City. Similar electric-bus V2G projects are being launched in multiple states, including California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts. Steelton-Highspire School District plans to explore using its electric school buses for backup power, although it hasn’t started that work yet.
All these variables put a lot of pressure on school districts, Tablan said — particularly those that lack an integrated plan for how to deal with them.
“Solar is typically decided by a facilities director, and the decision to electrify buses is made by a transportation director. They’re coordinating these decisions in a different way.”
Generation180’s School Leadership and Clean Energy Network connects districts that have undertaken these kinds of projects with those that haven’t yet, she noted.
Steelton-Highspire School District is still awaiting the first full year of solar and electric bus operations to get the data it needs to fine-tune its approach, Carnes said. “With us being underfunded, we have a number of other five-alarm fires we’re handling,” he said.
“The electric school buses are on the road, they’re running, they’re funded — we have to shift our focus to other issues at the school district,” he said. But he’s planning to take time during the coming summer break to “do a full deep dive on this. I want to know what number of miles per kilowatt-hour we’re getting.”
At the same time, Carnes recommended that school districts don’t wait too long to take action — particularly when delay could mean missing the opportunity to secure government grants.
“This is for all the other underprivileged, underfunded school districts out there,” he said. “You can do it — but you gotta go out and do it.”