California regulators have committed the state to ending fossil fuel use for its roughly 12,000-strong transit bus fleet by 2040, another long-term commitment to reducing the state’s carbon emissions that’s already being driven by the economics of electrifying transit and school buses.
Last week’s unanimous decision by the California Air Resources Board requires all newly purchased buses to be carbon-free by 2029, a classification that could include electric buses or hydrogen fuel cell-powered buses, and would phase out all diesel or natural-gas-powered buses by 2040.
California has a long way to go to reach these goals. Today, only about 150 zero-emission buses are operating in the fleets of the state’s 200 public transit agencies, a tiny fraction of the estimated 386,000 electric buses deployed around the world — 99 percent of them in China.
But cities and counties across the U.S. are beginning to commit to shift their entire fleets to battery-electric buses by a certain date, including Los Angeles County by 2030 and San Francisco by 2035 in California, according to a recent report by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
Learn more here from GreenTech Media.
