Our local school district has just taken delivery of one of the first (if not the first) plug-in hybrid electric school buses (PHEB) in the nation.
You can read about it here or here, see pictures here (it's yellow and looks like a school bus), or find out some details over the fold.
The bus is manufactured by International School Bus as part of the National Hybrid School Bus Buyers Consortium. The consortium has contracted for 19 PHEBs this year, mostly for evaluation purposes, and plans to contract for another 100 in the near future. The bus uses an 80kW drive train manufactured by Enova Systems. The same size units are also available for UPS/FedEx size trucks, as well as city bus size 120kW and semi tractor size 240kW systems.
The hybrid engine is a V8 diesel, about the size of a pickup truck engine.
The batteries were spec'd to provide 30 miles of driving, but in practice appear to provide about a 60 mile range. School buses make frequent stops which allows considerable energy recovery via regenerative braking.
The bus takes about 4 hours to recharge, meaning it can be charged between morning and afternoon runs. It also incorporates "Vehicle to Grid" technology, so it can charge off-peak and be used by the electric utility as an energy storage system on-peak.
Electricity locally is generated from hydro, and the school's transportation director indicates the batteries should be sufficient to handle all routes, so the bus will be close to or completely emission free. Electricity here runs less than 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, and the utility is county-owned. The utility (via the Port of Lake Chelan) also contributed to the purchase of the bus.
The cost of the 19 first-run buses is $212,000 each. Our school district is forbidden to invest in technology development, so the district only paid the $78,000 a traditional bus would cost. The balance was made up by grants of $56,000 from the consortium, $52,000 from the WA State Department of Ecology, $10,000 from the Port of Lake Chelan, and the balance from local donors (including one of our best friends who never told us the project was in the works so we could donate too).
A 100 bus order will drop the price per bus to about $140,000, which, according to our Transportation Director, will make the 15 year life-cycle cost comparable to a traditional school bus costing around $78,000.
As far as performance, the bus is claimed to have more starting torque than a conventional school bus (important here because nearly every route has a steep section - we're in/near the mountains). The diesel engine is also sufficient to power the bus by itself, should the electrical system fail, meaning kids are unlikely to be stranded if the new technology has bugs.
I couldn't find out how much diesel is used by school buses annually, but it's likely to be a considerable amount of fuel, generating a considerable amount of CO2.
Note to A. Siegel: It all happened without a carbon tax.