The company Lion Electric announced Monday that it had secured a conditional order for 1,000 electric school buses from Student Transportation of Canada (STC), a subsidiary of Student Transportation of America, whose controlling shareholder is the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Quebec (CDPQ).
The order, the value of which has not been specified, is conditional on obtaining a “satisfactory” amount of non-repayable grants from Infrastructure Canada’s Zero Emission Public Transit Fund, with which STC has deposited a grant application. Ottawa has announced plans to provide $ 2.75 billion over the next five years to support the electrification of transit and school transportation, through the Zero Emissions Transit Fund.
Deliveries would begin in 2022 and continue until the first half of 2026, Electric Lion said in a statement. These electric buses would replace diesel vehicles within STC’s fleet.
Lion calculates that the deployment of these 1,000 electric buses would eliminate up to 23,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases per year. The investment would also help achieve the decarbonization objectives of the CDPQ portfolio, which recently announced more ambitious targets in this regard.
If the order from Lion Electric were confirmed, STC would also become the largest zero-emission school bus operator in North America.
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