ALBANY COUNTY, N.Y. — A new White Paper released by the Anam Circle think tank highlights policies to promote electric school buses. The report, Electric School Buses: A Roadmap for Adoption and Expansion, identifies steps that state and municipal officials and other stakeholders can take to accelerate deployment of the emerging technology.
The White Paper lists several strategies to overcome the main challenge of funding, including grants from carbon pollution fees, public bonding, private equity, utility investments, and redirecting funding from diesel buses. The document also analyzes the advantages of ramping up production through aggregate purchases by states and municipalities to decrease costs and requiring utilities to provide power infrastructure connections to charging facilities.
“Electric school buses are on the way,” said White Paper author Joseph Murphy, a Policy Fellow at Anam Circle, “and this report shows the many ways we can speed that up.”
According to the White Paper, replacing diesel buses with electric models would help mitigate climate change and improve public health, especially for students riding the buses and local communities. The report also observes that a quick rollout of electric school buses would aid environmental justice by providing health benefits to low-income communities burdened with high levels of particulates and other pollution from diesel buses.
About Anam Circle
Anam Circle is an interdisciplinary, community-based eco-social think tank and innovation lab that provides policy analysis and research for community groups and local governments in New York’s Greater Capital District. Additional White Papers on various sustainability topics are posted on Anam Circle’s website, https://www.anamcircle.org.
