There have been a lot of questions about whether electric vehicles can hold up in Montana’s cold winters. This comes as the federal government expands incentives for schools to electrify their bus fleets. One district in Montana is now running a couple of electric buses for the second winter in a row.
Last year, Montana’s Legislature was considering new taxes on electric vehicles and chargers.
“Obviously I think most of us recognize that electric vehicles are not very practical for the state of Montana, especially in rural areas,” Ed Butcher said.
State Rep. Butcher, along with most of the Republican supermajority, was skeptical.
“They're interesting toys. If you got $100,000, you don't know what to do with, you can go buy one. But you might get stranded,” Butcher said.
At the same time, a few hundred miles north of the capital, the first electric school buses in the state started rolling out for daily pick-ups.
It gets cold in Havre. The town broke records just a few weeks ago when temperatures plummeted to negative 44 degrees.
“And with the wind chill it got as low as 60 below zero,” Paul Tuss said.
Tuss, also a state lawmaker, is from Havre.
“There was a lot of raised eyebrows and a lot of question marks about whether or not this was going to work,” Tuss said. “But apparently it has worked swimmingly. And some pretty cold temperatures here on the Hi-Line.”
Havre has had two electric school buses for a year now. Into their second winter, the buses are handling the cold just fine.
Inside the Havre public school’s bus barn, Allen Woodwick, or Woody as he’s known in town, is getting one of the big, yellow electric school buses ready for afternoon pickups.
“The noise you hear is the air compressor pumping up the air seat. There it is. That’s the engine running, that’s what you hear, that’s it,” Woodwick said.
A former city commissioner, and bus driver, Woodwick now helps manage the school’s bus fleet.
A few years ago when the school was in the market for two new buses, he applied for a state grant that covered 80% of the cost of the electric buses and their charging systems.
Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality received the funds from a large national settlement with Volkswagen over faked diesel emissions tests.
“When the smoke cleared, so to speak, with the two electrics we bought, we bought two of those and the charging systems for less than the price of one bus,” Woodwick said.
Woodwick said there were some initial doubts, but the school board supported the cost savings. Havre transports 3,500 students per day on its buses. Even with charging, the electric buses’ per mile cost is half the cost of regular gas engines and a quarter of the cost for diesel.
A year in, he said the buses run great — sometimes even better than their diesel and gas counterparts.
“We've had some issues with some of the other buses with air doors where the air freezes up,” Woodwick said. “We have some issues with just a diesel and, you know, it was 40 below here a week and a half ago. But the electrics kept going and they did well.”
While Havre’s electric buses were first in Montana, they certainly won’t be the last
The Biden Administration has allocated billions of dollars for electric vehicles and infrastructure, and specific funds for replacing diesel school buses with electric.
According to the American Lung Association, breathing in diesel exhaust can cause asthma attacks, premature deaths or cancer. And children are especially vulnerable to the effects.
In January, seven Montana school districts were awarded Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding to acquire 41 new electric buses.
Schools in Big Fork, Clinton and Fairfield are already running electric buses purchased with federal rebates through the EPA.
Woodwick just submitted a grant for those federal rebates too, hopefully, to get Havre two more buses.
“There were a lot of people that said you couldn't run electrics up in Montana, so that was somewhat of a challenge. And it looks like we've been proving the simple fact is ‘yes, we can,’” Woodwick said.
