Electric buses: another bankrupt green boondoggle

Electric buses are just like electric passenger vehicles: they’re not ready for prime time, only more so. Proterra buses are a case in point. Cities that wasted money on them found they had far less range then advertised. They commonly couldn’t complete even short, flat routes specifically designed for them. The enormous weight of their batteries cracked frames, and getting parts from the factory was virtually impossible. But to make up for their failures, they were far more expensive than reliable diesel buses. Proterra went bankrupt in August of 2023.

President Biden gave Proterra at least $10 million, and lauded it as the future: “when you start making a thousand buses a year, you’re going to need more room for customers.”  That makes as little sense as anything Biden is saying these days. And as with everything else, the Mummified Meat Puppet Administration is incapable of learning from its mistakes: 

The Biden administration is dispersing nearly another billion dollars in federal grants for school districts nationwide to decarbonize their bus fleets, despite recent inspector general findings casting doubt on the program.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in a joint announcement with the White House, said it had selected 67 applicants to receive approximately $965 million to purchase electric and low-emission school buses. The funding means the agency has now awarded nearly $2 billion for thousands of new buses across hundreds of school districts under its Clean School Bus Program, which was created in late 2021.

“As part of our work to tackle the climate crisis, the historic funding we are announcing today is an investment in our children, their health, and their education,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement. “It also strengthens our economy by investing in American manufacturing and America’s workforce.”

Image: SanJoaquinRTD. Wikimedia Commons.org. CCA-SA 3.0 Unported.

Sure, like Solyndra and other green companies that have gone belly-up, taking hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars with them. But for the MMPA, everything’s coming up roses:

The grants unveiled Monday will help selected applicants purchase more than 2,700 electric or low-emissions school buses in 280 school districts serving more than 7 million students across 37 states, according to EPA. Those awards come a year after the EPA awarded more than $875 million to 2022 applicants under the program, funding the replacement of 2,366 buses at 372 school districts.

Amazingly, not every arm of government is so enthusiastic:

However, the EPA Office of Inspector General in late December published the findings of an audit which determined that the Clean School Bus Program was largely dependent on utility companies’ ability to increase power supplies. Further, the program may also face significant delays, according to the inspector general, without construction of additional charging stations.

Entities interviewed by the inspector general’s office specifically expressed concern about the ability of utility providers to bring power lines and transformers to school districts with electric buses. While some power providers have experience with electric bus infrastructure, they said they had never built such infrastructure at scale.

Establishing charging stations and connecting them to the regional power grid could take as much as two years, according to the report. Additionally, bus charging stations that are expected to support more than 25 buses in larger school districts face other challenges since they require different technology. 

Two years? The MMPA, in a thrilling display of governmental efficiency, took about two years and $7.5 billion to build a single charging station.  

“The Agency may be unable to effectively achieve program goals unless it can ensure that school districts will be able to establish the infrastructure necessary to support clean bus and charging purchases,” the EPA inspector general concluded. “There could be delays in utilities constructing the needed charging stations to make the buses fully operational in a timely manner.”

“May be unable?” The EPA is being incredibly optimistic given what is known about electric vehicles in general and electric buses in particular. The problems electric passenger vehicles have in cold weather, and to a slightly lesser degree in warmer weather, are magnified in buses. Heating a cabin is a huge drain on batteries that lose around 50% of their capacity in the cold. Ford actually recommends owners of their F-150 Lightning pickups refrain from using the cabin heater in the cold, relying instead on seat and steering wheel heaters… but that’s not going to keep the windshield and windows clear.

In many cities, the electric infrastructure necessary to charge EV buses just doesn’t exist, and isn’t going to exist, upgrading such things being rather pricey. But that’s OK. All those electric buses are going to be abandoned, or spontaneously combust, just like all those taxpayer dollars, sooner rather than later.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.