Summertime in New England is when people demand the most electricity from the grid because of air conditioner use. At those high-demand times, utilities turn to so-called peaker plants to supply the extra power. They’re often older, more polluting facilities, and they are expensive to run. But a project in Beverly offers an alternative on-demand power source: the school district uses their electric school buses’ giant batteries as mini power plants to send energy back to the grid.
Beverly Public Schools is one of the first in the country to use its electric buses for more than transportation. The project uses bidirectional chargers that can both charge the bus battery and also allow the battery to send energy back to the grid.
The program in Beverly started in the summer of 2021 with one bus. Last summer, it increased to two buses and it sold seven megawatt hours back to the grid — the equivalent to powering over two hundred homes for an entire day. This summer, the school district expects to use three out of their four electric buses to provide backup power.
