Jackson Hole’s electric bus bust
Conn Carroll
Video Embed
Good thing Jackson, Wyoming, kept its fleet of 30 diesel buses on hand when it purchased eight electric buses to lower its transit system’s carbon emissions.
Thanks to the bankruptcy of the company that manufactures the buses, Jackson can’t get any replacement parts when the buses break down — which is now all of them. At a cost of $1 million each, now all eight electric buses are broken.
PENNSYLVANIA 2024 SENATE RACE TESTS INCUMBENT’S NAME RECOGNITION VS. RIVAL’S DEEP POCKETS
Not that any of the buses worked that great when they did have all their parts.
That a small town of just 10,000 people would need 40 buses for a transit system might seem odd, especially when you consider that the surrounding Teton County is the wealthiest county in the United States.
But thanks to restrictive environmental regulations, it is next to impossible to build any housing in Teton County, which means everyone who works at the valley’s three ski resorts has to be bused in from much cheaper surrounding communities. Teton County also has the nation’s highest income inequality.
Enter President Joe Biden’s infrastructure spending bill, which included $5.5 billion for electric buses. After signing the legislation, Biden visited an electric bus manufacturer in California named Proterra, telling the workers there at the time, “The fact is, you’re making me look good.”
The city of Jackson applied for the Biden bus grants and then used that money to buy electric buses from the very electric bus company Biden promoted.
But while the electric buses work fine in the summer, Jackson quickly discovered they did not work as well in the winter. Not only do batteries already perform worse in freezing temperatures, but the buses also have to be heated. Where a bus could go all day without a charge in the summer, the buses were forced to recharge at midday during the winter. Often, this just meant a diesel bus would take its place.
Then Proterra went bankrupt, and the orders for maintenance parts started going unfulfilled. Proterra has said the company intends to operate through the bankruptcy process, but so far, the disruption has meant no new parts and no running buses for Jackson.
“It’s kind of sad because we’re sitting next to a county that has the largest field of natural gas,” former Teton County Commissioner Paul Vogelheim told Fox News. Vogelheim thinks Jackson should have bought low-emission natural gas buses instead of going with Biden’s bus company.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“[It’s] the way that we’re kind of operating these days — we’re looking for that shiny, bright object. We all gotta go with zero emissions from battery-powered buses,” Vogelheim said.
Hopefully, other cities will learn from Jackson’s mistake and go with natural gas.