PhoenixEV completed a delivery on five, 40-foot ZX5 battery electric buses in May 2024 for the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The company says this has helped UCI maintain its electric fleet, which was established in January 2018, making it the first university in the nation to go all electric.
Since then, UCI has added 25 buses to their fleet and logged 1,183,210 miles. Also, the ridership for the 23-24 academic year was 1,464,378 while annually hitting 184,938 miles and averaging 3555 miles weekly.
The buses are charged using UCI’s microgrid, which consists of an internal utility tunnel loop connected to the local utility via an on-campus substation. The internal utility loop spans around the campus and connects the community of over 30,000 people to various distributed energy resources, including charging stations for each of the new Anteater Express buses. Also, charging their fleet costs only $0.37 per mile compared to the $1.53 per mile they could be spending with diesel.
“PhoenixEV is proud of our partnership with UCI,” says Denton Peng CEO of PhoenixEV. “UCI is a forward-thinking university dedicated to sustainable transportation for their students and community and we are delighted to be a strategic electric bus partner with UC Irvine.”
This partnership marks a step forward for both PhoenixEV and UCI as PhoenixEV continues its plans to expand its reach into the educational market, while UCI continues its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through zero or low emission vehicles.
