The Biden administration has issued the next round of funding aimed at cleaning up the country’s school bus fleet. On Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded nearly $900 million in rebates to help more than 500 school districts buy about 3,400 clean school buses — 92 percent of them electric.
With this new round, nearly $3 billion in funding has been awarded to date from a $5 billion program created by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The first round of rebates, nearly $1 billion awarded in October 2022, enabled about 370 school districts to order some 2,500 electric school buses across the country. A second round of nearly $1 billion in grants issued this January provided 67 applicants with money to buy more than 2,700 clean school buses serving 280 school districts.
Almost all of the roughly 500,000 school buses operating in the U.S. are diesel-fueled. Replacing those with clean buses could eliminate about 8 million metric tons per year of carbon emissions. Aside from their climate impact, diesel buses emit air pollution harmful to the health of the children who ride them and the communities they operate in.
“This announcement is not just about clean school buses — it’s about the bigger picture,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a Tuesday media briefing. “We are improving air quality for our children, reducing greenhouse gas pollution, and expanding our nation’s leadership in developing the clean vehicles of the future. With increasing demand for electric school buses, we’ll see the development of new good-paying manufacturing jobs and investment in local businesses.”
Electric school buses are two to three times more expensive than their diesel counterparts but can cost significantly less to fuel and maintain over their lifespans. Meanwhile, the boost in business for the biggest U.S. school bus manufacturers, which include Blue Bird, Thomas Built, and Navistar IC Bus, as well as Canadian electric bus manufacturer Lion Electric, is expected to drive down their costs in the future, said Zealan Hoover, director of implementation for EPA programs funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act.
EPA has slightly reduced the per-bus rebates for this most recent round of awards compared to the first round of rebates issued in 2022 to “put downward pressure on prices,” Hoover said. “We want to find that sweet spot of preserving equity and access, while remaining clear that we want to see cost reductions as the sector scales.”
That’s part of the EPA program’s broader goal to serve as a “bridge to a self-sustaining pace of decarbonization for the sector,” Hoover said. “Bringing down costs is certainly a challenge. But we know that the cost of electric vehicles compared to internal combustion vehicles is falling.”
There’s still a long way to go to electrify the U.S. school bus fleet. As of May, the total number of U.S. electric school buses “committed” — a figure that includes buses operating, on order, or funded to be purchased — stood at 8,820, according to data collected by the World Resources Institute’s Electric School Bus Initiative, which tracks all electric school buses, not just those funded by the EPA program. That’s 1.8 percent of the total U.S. school bus fleet — a ratio that has risen from just over 1 percent since mid-2023.
Of those 8,820 electric school buses, 3,792 are “delivered or operating” in 48 states. Another 1,572 have been ordered from manufacturers, and another 3,456 have been awarded funds for purchase.
Those numbers reflect the fact that securing the buses is a time-consuming process, one that involves placing the orders with bus manufacturers, getting the buses built and delivered, and installing the charging equipment needed to start using them.
The EPA program has had its share of hiccups since it was launched in 2022. As of late last year, 9 percent of the school districts that won awards in the first round of rebates — 36 of them — had withdrawn their plans for using the money, while 43 percent had sought and received extensions beyond an April deadline for ordering the buses.
Some of these school districts have found that they weren’t able to cover their share of the cost of the buses they’d planned to buy, Sue Gander, director of WRI’s Electric School Bus Initiative, told Canary Media last year. Others have had trouble managing the cost of the charging equipment or the utility grid upgrades required to support them.