UPS' hybrid trucks, Walmart's hybrid trucks, London's hybrid buses and now hybrid school buses.  Yeah!  A. Siegel, DailyKos blogger who writes on energy and energy policy issues, has a post discussing the $10 million the Department of Energy just set aside for another round of plug-in school bus improvement along with funding another 60 buses for testing.  There has been a Plug-In Hybrid Electric (PHEB), school bus program for awhile. 

Lake Chelan, here in Washington, along with several other jurisdictions, received buses in programs going back to 2002.  At least some of the towns that received the buses conducted serious tests.  In Mantee County, Florida, in order to test the viability of the new buses, "a hybrid and a control bus travel the same route, alternating every two weeks, for a period of two years which should equate to more than a million miles of service each . . . An array of different measures will be tracked via a GPS system including acceleration, deceleration, braking, fuel economy and more."

Seigel talks about how the participants in the tests responded.  "And, those in the test program are, from everything that I am hearing and seeing, ecstatic about the buses. Many in the blogosphere had a chance to hear this first hand as the Austin Independent School District brought there PHESB to Netroots Nation for a morning.  And, the words were glowing, praising the bus's performance and very happy about the about 80% reduction in fuel use.

Take a look at the objective: 'fuel economy improvements of 70 to 100 percent will be realized on the plug-in hybrid vehicles plus a reduction in emissions of up to 90 percent'."

Seigel doesn't leave it at that.  He comes clean about the current price - in the range of $225,000 each as opposed to the regular new bus price of $75,000.  But . . . . An order of 100 buses drops the price per bus to $140,000 which means the bus will pay for itself in relation to a regular bus.  But . . . . After 1000 buses, in some form of sustained production process brings the per bus price down to the neighborhood of $115,000 as which point they make economic sense in just a few years.   

Now let's look at gas mileage.  An ordinary bus gets 6-8 miles per gallon.  The new plug-in hybrids get about 12 m.p.g.  At slightly more than half the gas mileage, school districts will save bundles.   "If the nation could double its fleet miles, school savings could be significant. About 475,000 buses transport 25 million kids each day. Traveling more than 4 billion miles a year, those buses burn about 550 million gallons of fuel annually."  Using hybrids would reduce US imports of oil by $250 million per year (at $50 per barrel.)

Seigel is suggesting that the government increase the amount they are spending on this program from $10 million to $500 million, which would bring the per bus cost down to affordable amounts and get the industry over the sustained production hurdle.  then there is also the reduction in greenhouse gases and reduction in the health hazards of diesel to children and on and on.  Let's do it!