Also consider that the cost of diesel is likely to stay high into the future.
http://archive.today/ohDsz | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-17/the-world...
Given this prevailing trend, I do wonder what percentage of projected lifecycle opex is attributable to fuel, and whether any savings will be realized in the end.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...
Also: School buses generally run on CNG, not diesel. They usually have special filling stations for that. They can toss all of that (but then they have to make EV charging stations lol).
But yea, the stinky old detroit screaming jimmy diesels have been gone for decades now. They phased those out when I was a kid lol.
This made me curious, because its definitely not true where I live. I don't know about "gone for decades", but one decade ago LAUSD had one-third of their fleet running CNG[1]. Pretty interesting.
[1] https://www.socalgas.com/documents/innovation/natural-gas-ve...
The article you referenced is the average price consumers pay, much of cost is going to come from peak times.
Today, we know how LADWP commercial time-of-use[1] is windowed while fossil fuels remain the dominant energy source, but I have yet to encounter an argument supporting a thesis that these windows will immutably hold (or shift favorably) in the near future, let alone throughout the expected lifecycle of these buses; mean reversion is far more likely, rendering an "off peak hours" operations efficiency strategy moot.
As a selling point to the public, the article claims the investment will:
> ...save the district $2 million on bus maintenance and fuel costs annually.
I'd be interested in sanity checking which sphincter and under what assumptions they pulled that number out of. The going concern in my mind is this +10% CAGR trend in the average cost of electricity for the locality as evident in BLS data previously cited. If that trend continues unchecked, electricity is projected to cost +33% more in 2026 relative to today when the fleet of buses reach full operational capability, and over 3x more by 2035 when the state is postured to be at 100% new ZEV sales.
To be sure, I'm not trying to assert that this isn't a net positive for the district...just level setting the narrative that a decision being sold to the public as an investment which yields net lifecycle savings is looking much more like an outright expense increase to be carried by taxpayers with notional 2nd-order effects conveniently dismissed.
[1] https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/faces/ladwp/commercial/c-custome...
The economics of distribution are weird. A lot of the infrastructure runs on 100-year old lines that are fully depreciated which have $0 capital costs until they don't. Costs are proportional to capacity rather than to usage. There are massive scale effects -- building a line that carries twice as much current is only slightly more expensive. But the big one is threshold effects. I have 100Amp service to my house. That service is over 60 years old and fully depreciated (aka basically free). OTOH, upgrading it to 200 or 400 amps will cost a lot of money. That same effect is rippling through the entire grid. I installed a 24Amp car charger instead of a 50Amp one to avoid upgrading my service.
And peak usage is always going to be during the day, even if California goes 100% EV and mostly charges at night. Peak air conditioning demand is going to be higher than peak EV charging demand.
Cheap overnight rates keep peak demands below capacity to avoid having to do expensive distribution upgrades. Even if it seems odd because the cheapest generation is during the day.