New Creative Ways to Reduce to Cost of Electric Buses for City Mass Transit Systems.

Here's what would drive even more electric buses into U.S. cities

The ski resort community that's home to the Sundance Film Festival - Park City, Utah - is also the birthplace of something far geekier: a new business model for selling electric buses. The tourist destination was the first community in the U.S.

From article, (The ski resort community that’s home to the Sundance Film Festival — Park City, Utah — is also the birthplace of something far geekier: a new business model for selling electric buses.

The tourist destination was the first community in the U.S. to buy a fleet of electric buses by leasing the batteries that power the buses from Silicon Valley startup Proterra. The city leases the buses’ batteries out of its operational funds in the same way that it would have bought fuel for diesel buses. Diesel buses are the standard type of bus that most cities use for moving residents around.

The funding innovation is important because it lowered the upfront cost that Park City paid for its new fleet, bringing it closer, or even below, what it would have paid for diesel buses. At the same time, the leasing model also allowed the city to lower its risk around the batteries, which over the past few years have gotten both dramatically lower in cost and somewhat higher in energy density.  

Alternative financing has helped other energy technologies break out and it could do so for electric buses, too. The business model of paying for solar power as a service helped solar panels morph from being a niche energy source to becoming a mainstream form of power generation for home owners (although in recent years the trend has shifted back to loans).

 Park City isn’t the only city experimenting with alternative ways to pay for electric buses. In recent months, New York’s MTA — which operates the largest bus fleet in the U.S. — decided to lease five of Proterra’s electric buses (both the batteries and the buses) over a three-year period. The Big Apple is looking to experiment with the technology through a pilot program, which could help it make decisions for a larger investment down the road.)

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