The Four Electric Vehicles in Vermont That Could Help Save the Grid

The four vehicles parked at a depot in South Burlington, Vt., look no different from the yellow school buses familiar to millions of schoolchildren. But beneath their steel shells, these buses are packed with technology that could be vital in the transition to clean energy.

While their main job remains transporting children, the vehicles take on a second task while sitting idle during school hours. The local utility puts their batteries to work, storing excess renewable energy so it can be pumped back into the grid when needed.

The buses are a test of the idea that electric vehicles, which skeptics often see as an expensive burden that could bring down electric grids, could be just the opposite: a buffer that soaks up power when there is too much and provides it when demand for electricity surges.

Any suitably equipped electric vehicle can be used to store surplus electricity, avoiding the need for utilities to fire up gas-fueled power plants when there isn’t enough sun or wind. But school buses work especially well because they have big batteries and spend much of the day parked.

“There’s no better tool than an electric school bus fleet to sort of smooth those curves,” said Duncan McIntyre, the chief executive of Highland Fleets, a company near Boston that provides the buses and equipment. Synop, a New York firm, provides the software to manage the interaction between vehicles, chargers and the grid.

Utilities across the country have been testing the ability of batteries in electric vehicles to help stabilize increasingly unreliable power plants and lines that have faltered under stress from hurricanes, heat waves and other extreme weather linked to climate change.