School Districts' Benefits with Electric School Bus V2B Enhancements

Electric vehicles (EVs) offer significant environmental benefits and enable advanced energy management through Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) applications, including Vehicle-to-Building (V2B). This study explores the benefits of integrating V2B technologies for a school building with a fleet of Electric School Buses (ESB) and a solar PV system. A V2B Energy Management System (EMS) was developed to manage the charging and discharging of a fleet of ESB using Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) Time-of-Use (ToU) and peak demand rates for a typical school building load in San Francisco, California. Simulations of various EMS modes, including unmanaged charging, managed charging, and V2B, revealed that V2B technology can significantly lower electricity costs through energy arbitrage and peak shaving. With increased use of ESB batteries for V2B, battery life concerns necessitated further analysis. Simulations using a battery degradation model for a 2017 Chevy Bolt battery revealed that with a lower range of operation of State of Charge (SoC), for NMC type batteries, can reduce battery degradation with V2B operations. The findings demonstrate the potentials of V2B EMS to lower building energy cost while minimizing the adverse effects on battery life for ESB fleet.