It's Monday. The Eastern grid spent last week brushing against a demand record that had stood for twenty years, and some of the credit for holding the line belongs to a fleet that spends its school-year afternoons in pickup lines.
In today's edition:
🚌 School buses turn power plant through the heat dome
⚡ Quick Hits: Germany's 58% record, battery swapping lands in NYC, home batteries clock in
💰 Capital: a green hydrogen first order and a 400 MWh storage deal
📋 Policy Watch: a green retailer's collapse tests the safety net, and balcony solar's statehouse wave
📊 Chart: the interconnection queue is now half again bigger than the entire US fleet
The Big Story
Electric school buses shore up the grid through the heat dome.
As last week's heat dome pushed Eastern grids toward all-time peaks, fully deployed vehicle-to-grid school bus projects were doing the opposite of what critics feared EVs would do: feeding stored energy back to utilities at the hours it mattered most. The World Resources Institute's Electric School Bus Initiative counts roughly 230 buses across fully deployed US V2G projects that can now discharge to the grid on demand, and summer break leaves those fleets parked, charged, and available exactly when air-conditioning load peaks.
"It's very early days, (but) school buses will be a critically important backbone of V2G capacity."
Some 230 buses across fully deployed US V2G projects can return 8 MWh to the grid at any given time, enough to power about 1,600 typical homes for up to four hours of peak shaving.
Oakland Unified School District operates the largest fleet, 74 buses returning an estimated 2.1 GWh to California's grid each year.
San Francisco Unified launches a 104-bus project next month, expected to top Oakland at about 3 GWh annually, with the fleet slated to pass 238 buses by 2028.
Roughly 6,700 electric school buses are already in service on US roads; putting even half on V2G would put well over 100 MWh of flexible energy on call for peak demand.
Quick Hits
Quick bites from across the grid.
Holiday weekend, quiet wires: a record in Germany, and batteries of every size picking up grid work.
Germany covered a record 58% of its first-half electricity consumption with renewables, per preliminary BDEW/ZSW figures, with offshore wind generation up 28% while hydro fell 8% on low rainfall. RenewEconomy
Sungrow won a smarter E Award for its grid-forming PowerTitan 3.0 storage platform at Intersolar Europe, a visibility marker for grid-forming inverters as they move from pilot projects to product lines. Energy-Storage.news
Honda is backing the first US commercial e-bike battery-swap network, launching in New York City, an American debut for the swap infrastructure model already scaling across Asia. CleanTechnica
Home battery fleets were dispatched through last week's Eastern heat dome, with aggregated residential systems joining EVs on the list of behind-the-meter resources that helped utilities avoid emergency load shedding. Electrek
The Capital Stack
Hysata books its first commercial-scale electrolyser order.
Hysata, the Australian startup founded five years ago on a promise to transform the economics of green hydrogen, signed a deal to deliver its first large-scale electrolyser, landing its first export customer in the process. For a heavily watched electrolyser developer, the first commercial-scale order is the moment the efficiency claims start converting into revenue, and it arrives as green hydrogen capital has grown notably choosier about which technology bets stay funded.
Source: RenewEconomy
Also in the capital stack:
Jinko ESS signed contracts with developer Taliva Energy for a 400 MWh energy storage project portfolio, a modest but live signal that storage procurement kept moving through the holiday lull. Energy-Storage.news
Policy Watch
Zen Energy collapsed into voluntary administration on Friday, four days after the Australian Energy Regulator conditionally approved the sale of its retail business to commodities trader Gunvor, triggering South Australia's retailer-of-last-resort scheme and shifting its customers to AGL; the failure of an approval premised on the company being a going concern is a live test of how regulators vet stressed green retailers, with PPAs for the 400 MW New England solar farm and a virtual toll on the 111 MW / 270 MWh Templers battery now in an administrator's hands. RenewEconomy
Balcony solar keeps compounding in the statehouses, with a new roundup tracking the accelerating wave of state bills to legalize plug-in solar in the week after New Jersey's unanimous Garden State Balcony Solar Act; a permit-free residential solar market is taking shape state by state. CleanTechnica
Chart of the Day
The queue is now half again as large as the US fleet.
There were 2,061 GW of generation and storage sitting in US interconnection queues at the end of 2025, about 50% more than the installed capacity of the entire US power fleet, and half again the size of the 1,374 GW fleet that existed in 2010. The sobering footnote comes from LBNL's own completion rates: based on history, less than 20% of proposed projects and about 13% of that capacity are likely to ever come online.
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