Moreno Valley Unified School District announced plans in March 2022 to deploy California's largest electric school bus fleet. The project was publicly announced in June 2022 and became operational in August 2022. The deployment consisted of 42 electric school buses from IC Bus, serving more than 31,000 students across 42 schools.
The charging infrastructure included 43 InCharge Energy ICE-30 30 kW DC fast chargers managed by InCharge Energy's InControl software platform. The total project cost was $5 million for the buses themselves, funded by $11 million in combined state and federal grants. The district projected $600,000 in annual savings from reduced fuel and maintenance costs compared to diesel buses.
The district initially deployed electric buses for special-needs transportation before expanding to general student routes. Partners on the project included Creative Bus Sales (the dealer), IC Bus (the manufacturer), and InCharge Energy (charging infrastructure and software).
The 43-charger count for 42 buses provided one spare for redundancy, ensuring that charger maintenance or failures wouldn't prevent buses from charging overnight. At 30 kW per charger, each bus could fully charge overnight during the typical 8-12 hour dwell time between afternoon dropoff and morning pickup... if we managed the charging perfectly under the power constraints of the site.
The Unit Economics That Actually Work
This project demonstrates the specific conditions under which electric school bus economics become viable.
The $11 million in grants for a $5 million fleet deployment is the critical variable. Without that funding ratio—roughly 2.2x coverage—the transition wouldn't have produced immediate positive returns. The $600K annual savings represents meaningful operational improvement, but the capital requirement would have created a payback period that school district budgets couldn't absorb.
This reveals the market reality for electric school buses in 2022: they required substantial grant support to make financial sense. The technology worked, the operational savings were real, but the upfront capital costs were still prohibitive without external funding. Districts that couldn't access similar grant programs would face different economic decisions.
The product management insight is about understanding your customer's actual buying process. School districts don't optimize for total cost of ownership over 12 years—they optimize for what fits in next year's capital budget. The grant funding transformed an impossible capital expense into a manageable one with immediate operational savings. InCharge's role wasn't just providing chargers; it was helping navigate the grant application process to unlock funding that made the project financially possible.
The special-needs transportation pilot before full deployment also reflects risk management in public sector procurement. School districts face community scrutiny if bus service fails. The transportation director at Moreno put his neck out to help mitigate pollution in a district that suffered from some of the worst air quality in the state. Starting with a smaller route set (special needs students with more predictable schedules) allowed the district to validate the technology, train drivers, and build operational confidence before putting the entire student population on electric buses.
The partnership structure—dealer, manufacturer, and charging provider working together—indicates that no single vendor had a complete school bus electrification solution in 2022. The district had to coordinate three separate companies, each handling different components. This fragmentation creates implementation risk and suggests a market gap for integrated turnkey solutions.