California School District Jumps Into Solar, Storage, & Electric Buses

A school district in Porterville, California, in the Central Valley, is building a large solar and battery system to power a fleet of electric school buses. The Porterville Unified School District is working with ForeFront Power and The Mobility House on the project, which includes a 763 kW solar array over parking lots, a 408 kW / 1,632 kWh battery to store power, and a microgrid controller that can disconnect the site from the regular utility grid during outages. A U.S. EPA Clean School Bus Program grant is helping pay for it.

The setup will support 35 fast chargers for electric buses, plus eight more chargers for the district's other vehicles. Two of those chargers can send power back to the grid, a setup called vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, which lets a charged bus act like a backup battery for the community during emergencies or planned power shutoffs. The district serves more than 14,000 students, most from lower-income households, in an area with some of the worst air quality in the country, and it aims to convert its whole bus fleet to electric by 2035.

None of this is something an individual homeowner needs to act on, but it shows a pattern spreading in California and elsewhere: schools pairing solar and batteries with electric vehicle charging to cut energy costs and add backup power during outages. It's the same basic combination — solar, storage, and a way to keep power flowing when the grid goes down — that shows up in home energy upgrades, just built at a much larger scale.