It's no secret to the majority of our readers that it is possible to run many older diesel engines on nothing more than straight vegetable oil. In fact, the first diesel engine, invented by Rudolph Diesel, ran on peanut oil. This fact is also well known by the students at the Michigan Technical Academy who have converted their own school buses to run on waste vegetable oil. Garden Fresh Foods in Ferndale, Michigan is providing used veggie oil that was first used to fry tortilla chips for no charge. The total cost of the fuel for the two buses that are running on 100-percent veggie oil is estimated at about 80-cents a gallon. Other buses are running on a 10-percent blend of oil and diesel fuel. As the temps in Michigan go down, the blend will be adjusted, though the students are currently hard at work solving that problem with heaters. Great work.

[Source: The Detroit News]

Stephan Wilkinson at The Truth About Cars has noticed that school buses in his neighborhood seem to all leave at the same time, carrying only a few kids each. Additionally, they idle for long periods of time before and after they leave, at which time they belch out harmful toxins. He seems to think that the school system could make much better use of the equipment that they have and that they could probably get by with much less. This is likely a problem in wealthy communities the country over. A potential solution exists in biodiesel buses and hybrid buses, which are likely to hit the market soon enough, but in the meantime, if this is a problem in your own school district, you can do what Wilkinson plans to do and speak with the school board.

[Source: The Truth About Cars]

Last week the Napa Unified School District in California received its first plug-in hybrid school bus. The bus was built by IC Corporation which is a subsidiary of Navistar and a major producer of school buses. The bus uses a parallel hybrid diesel electric powertrain produced by Enova. The electric motor is integrated into the transmission and is designed as a drop-in system that can be easily installed either by the bus manufacturer on the original assembly or retrofitted to existing buses.

Enova has developed two systems: a charge depleting plug-in system and a charge sustaining system. The latter uses smaller batteries and operates similarly to most current parallel hybrid systems. The plug-in system used on the Napa bus uses a larger battery system that can be charged from the grid and run down during the duty cycle of the bus. The plug-in system can get up to a ninety percent reduction in emissions and one hundred percent reduction in fuel consumption based on the duty cycle.

[Source: Enova Systems]

In an article which discusses an invention that could be described as thrifty, useful or just crazy, depending on your point of view, Forbes highlights Jewish Rabbi Aaron Winternitz's conversion of an old school bus into an oven for cooking matzos for the upcoming Passover celebration. Officials were responding to reports of smoke when they located the bus/oven around 3 am. This would have been the second year that the Rabbi had used the bus for cooking Passover food. New York officials have stopped the cooking until the Rabbi can produce the necessary documentation to satisfy safety regulations. Inventive, no?

[Source: Forbes]

A group of California school districts are getting together to try and get a grant from PG&E, the California Air Resources Board and other groups for the purchase of some new school buses. The Madera, Clovis, Kings Canyon, Visalia, and Fresno districts want to acquire a fleet of compressed natural gas powered plug-in hybrid school buses. They are looking for $3.25 million for the purchase of two Blue Bird buses for each district. The Madera district has also approved an extra $10,000 a year in funding for training, support and data collection for the duration of the hybrid test program.

[Source: Madera Tribune]

School buses idle for thousands of hours a year, spewing diesel fumes into schoolyards across the country. But a project called Improving Kids' Environment (IKE) based in Indianapolis, Ind. is working to educate school officials on how the practice affects students with their "Smart Schools Don't Idle" campaign. IKE was awarded a $15,729 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5 on Friday. IKE and nine other organizations were awarded $187,200 in grant money from the EPA Region 5 this year. IKE's goal is that "the school communit[ies] will be able to make informed decisions about personal behaviors and how they affect air quality."

[Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5]

If running even the biggest SUV or farm tractor on biofuel isn't a large enough vehicle for you, then perhaps you'd be interested in converting an old school bus to use biodiesel. If so, there is a Yahoo! group you'll want to check out: the Skoolie Conversions group. This group isn't dedicated exclusively to biofuels but instead to converting old busses into RVs. Still, biofuel discussions are not unknown, as this post at Green Trust shows. Last Friday, Steve Spence posted about his friend who is about to convert an old school bus into a biodiesel RV. You have to join the Yahoo! group to read all about it, but if going old Skool is your thing, that won't be difficult.

[Source: Skoolie Conversions via Green Trust Sustainability & Renewable Energy]