First Student and Con Edison Complete Phase One of $9 Million New York Electric Bus Pilot
The $9 million East New York project combines school bus electrification with grid-asset ambitions, backed by $2 million in NYSERDA funding.
First Student and Con Edison have closed phase one of a $9 million electric school bus pilot at a depot in East New York, Brooklyn, Canary Media reported on Wednesday (2026-09-23). Ten buses now operate from the site, combining six new all-electric vehicles with four former diesel buses retrofitted to run on battery power.4
US diesel prices stood at $4.90 a gallon on Wednesday (2026-09-23). Fleet operators with large diesel school bus inventories carry that cost each day routes run. New York State's incentive agency, NYSERDA, provided roughly $2 million in funding toward the East New York fleet, meaning state ratepayers are absorbing a share of the upfront cost to remove diesel burn from those streets.4
Two of the buses at the depot carry 3-kilowatt solar arrays on their roofs, the panels supplying power directly to the batteries. East New York residents face disproportionately high rates of asthma and respiratory conditions, Canary Media noted, driven partly by elevated tailpipe pollution, a public health argument that has strengthened school district and utility applications for clean transport subsidies in New York and elsewhere.4
The national count of electric school buses hit more than 8,500 as of June 2026, up 66% from the same month in 2025, according to World Resources Institute data. The Con Edison pilot is a small fraction of that total, but its placement in one of the country's most congested urban grids gives it a specific test value: whether school bus depots on stressed distribution circuits outperform scattered residential EV chargers as grid assets.4
Utility Dive reported on Wednesday (2026-09-16) that utilities are taking a sharper interest in bus depots because of where they sit on the distribution network. Fremont Unified School District, southeast of Oakland, operates 14 electric school buses with eight more on order, and its depot's position on high-need circuits has been described as significantly more impactful for local grid relief than the more dispersed Oakland bus fleet.3
Whether the Con Edison partnership eventually delivers bidirectional grid services is not confirmed by the information published so far. Massachusetts offers a cautionary parallel. The state's vehicle-to-everything pilot disqualified roughly 75% of nearly 300 residential applicants immediately because their homes already had solar installations, according to Elijah Sinclair, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center's senior program manager. Program design for distributed grid services has repeatedly struggled to keep pace with actual grid conditions on the ground.1
Con Edison's operational position removes one friction point Massachusetts ran into. As the distribution operator for New York City, it controls the circuits the buses connect to, which simplifies dispatch coordination. New York's generation mix has also shifted. Governor Kathy Hochul announced completion of the 1.25-gigawatt Champlain Hudson Power Express, a 339-mile high-voltage direct-current line from the Canadian border expected to deliver up to 10.4 terawatt-hours of clean electricity to New York City each year, covering roughly 20% of the city's power needs and reducing the carbon load on the electricity now charging those buses.2
Ten buses at one depot cannot demonstrate grid-balancing value at any meaningful scale, however well-positioned on the distribution network. First Student and Con Edison have not disclosed a timeline or funding commitment for subsequent phases. What the pilot still needs to produce — and has not yet published — is actual dispatch data: real grid-service records that other utilities and fleet operators can use to model replication rather than rely on projections.4,3