Maryland county switching back to diesel buses after failed EV experiment
Maryland’s largest school district is reverting back to diesel-powered school buses after its push for an all-electric fleet wasted millions of dollars.
A failed climate experiment
The Montgomery County Board of Education in 2022 approved a $168 million contract to replace 326 diesel school buses with electric ones. The move came in response to the state’s Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022, which called for a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and an expansion of Maryland’s electric vehicle (EV) fleet.
“We are going to be saving upwards of 6,500 gallons of diesel fuel per day, and immediately, this is going to cut costs by 50%,” boasted the then-Montgomery County Public School (MCPS) at a ribbon-cutting ceremony in October 2022.
But a report last week from Montgomery County’s Office of the Inspector General found that the decision was an expensive failure. Out of 326 buses ordered, only 16 have been delivered. MCPS failed to include a provision in its agreement with the contractor that would have saved more than $1.8 million in extra costs resulting from the non-delivery.
Furthermore, the electric buses that were delivered experienced difficulties that kept the buses from running routes 280 times. These challenges were either due to mechanical failures or poor charging infrastructure. In more than half of these cases, the contractor failed to repair the vehicles within the required five-day time frame.
MCPS is now asking the Board of Education for approval to buy 90 diesel buses for $14,749,919.
New York also returns to diesel trucks
But Montgomery County is not the only jurisdiction to regret its EV fervor. Last year the New York Department of Sanitation (NYDOS) switched back to using diesel trucks after discovering that its fleet of electric garbage trucks could not withstand the winter.
The NYDOS had announced an initiative to convert its entire fleet of 6,000 garbage trucks from diesel-power to electric. The city’s rear-loader trucks are equipped with plows that allow the trucks to collect garbage even during the heavy snowstorms that often beleaguer the city.
But the city found that while the electric trucks — each coming with a $523,000 price tag — could remove garbage, they could only plow for four hours before running out of battery. With approximately 19,000 miles of road requiring plowing every winter, this would mean some communities having to manually clear their own roads.
"We found that they could not plow the snow effectively — they basically conked out after four hours,” said Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “We need them to go 12 hours." She added, "Given the current state of the technology, I don't see today a path forward to fully electrifying the rear loader portion of the fleet by 2040. We can't really make significant progress in converting our rear loader fleet until the snow challenges are addressed."
