North Dakota’s first all-electric school bus continues to be a head turner. The bus, a joint project of the Coalition for a Secure Energy Future, Minnkota Power, Cass County Electric Cooperative, and the West Fargo Public Schools, was recently featured as part of an electric vehicle showcase in Grand Forks. The Blue Bird bus is a first for the company in a state other than California and engineers are looking forward to testing real-time use in our region’s cold climate.
The event dubbed Plugged into the Future, drew several hundred people to check out a wide variety of lignite-powered vehicles like the Chevy Bolt, Tesla Model 3, and the Blue Bird Electric School Bus. The bus which will be used by West Fargo Public Schools for the first time this fall has a range of over 100 miles per charge and will be able to serve any of the routes for the school district. Officials in West Fargo are excited about the deployment of this new bus which will have significant cost savings over the current diesel models. A typical diesel bus on a West Fargo route costs about 55 cents per mile to operate while the electric bus has a cost around 13 cents per mile.
According to Minnkota, [the event] “welcomed city leaders, economic development groups, universities and public schools, transportation officials, lawmakers and more to check out the bus themselves. They came with many insightful questions about what it takes to incorporate an electric bus into a standard fleet and walked away with new transportation ideas for their organizations and neighborhoods.”
The group that organized the bus will continue to update Lignite Energy Council members on its progress and hope to be able to deploy a bus to other regions of the state.