Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Fremont Unified School District (FUSD), and The Mobility House just launched one of California’s most advanced vehicle-to-grid (V2G) electric school bus fleets, delivering cleaner rides for students and extra power for the state’s grid.
FUSD’s electric fleet now includes 14 buses – four Thomas Built and 10 Blue Bird models – and 22 chargers. Fourteen of those are lower-power units already in place, six are high-power bidirectional V2G DC fast chargers, and two more high-power unidirectional chargers are coming in 2026. The new setup will replace six diesel buses, with four electric models hitting the road this year and two more in 2026.
The project is part of the California Energy Commission-funded Replicable Vehicle-to-X Deployment Study (RVXDS) and is led by The Mobility House. Its ChargePilot platform will manage when buses charge and discharge power using open standards, turning these yellow workhorses into mobile batteries that can feed the grid when demand spikes.
“Electric school buses, with their large batteries and predictable schedules, have tremendous potential to support the electric grid with V2G,” said Gregor Hintler, CEO North America of The Mobility House.
The ChargePilot system will also let FUSD participate in PG&E’s Emergency Load Reduction Program (ELRP), responding to OpenADR signals to send stored power back to the grid during peak demand.
To make all this possible, PG&E upgraded the district’s electrical backbone: a new 480-volt 3-phase service entrance (up from 208V), a 750kVA transformer supporting up to 700kW peak load, and a 2,500-amp switchgear to handle future charging growth. The utility also fast-tracked the process with a streamlined Rule 15/16 service upgrade and connected the site under Rule 21, enabling energy exports and extra revenue for the district.
This is the second school district in PG&E’s commercial fleet Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) pilot, after a 2024 deployment with Zum and Oakland Unified. FUSD has been in PG&E’s EV Fleet program since 2019, which has provided incentives for 17 school buses and 13 medium-duty EVs.
“We’ve already seen how the electric buses can contribute to cleaner air for our community,” said Ernest Epley, FUSD’s director of transportation. “Now, we have the opportunity to use these buses to deliver clean and reliable energy too.”
Read more: The surprising powerhouse behind rapid V2X growth: electric school buses
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