Municipalities looking to decarbonize both their transportation fleets and their grid have a secret weapon: school buses.

EV buses can help municipalities reduce emissions from transportation—the biggest source of CO2 emissions in the US—but they also present an opportunity to bolster the electrical grid through bidirectional charging programs that can turn buses into batteries.

As a result...Efforts to make use of electric buses as both transportation and battery storage are underway across the US—particularly in California, a leader in vehicle-to-grid (V2G) experiments.

“If it’s a diesel bus, the time that it’s sitting there between routes, it’s just rotting, and leaking fluids and getting tired. Whereas, the electric bus can do other things in all of that time,” Sean Leach, director of technology and platform management at Highland Electric Fleets, which supplies and manages electric buses for schools, told us.

• “We have a very large battery sitting down there, basically, because these are just batteries on wheels,” he added.

Zoom in: Some of the first V2G applications for electric buses are happening in the schoolyard. That’s because the schedule of school-bus trips throughout the year makes them well-suited to double as distributed energy resources, experts told us.

Read about the boom in EV buses here.—GD

When it comes to America’s deployment of C-band 5G, you’d be forgiven for thinking the “C” stands for contentious.

What’s new? In late October, the FAA logged another entry in the ongoing airline-5G saga, this time asking the FCC to mandate additional voluntary operating limits on C-band 5G deployments near airports for 19 small- and mid-tier telecoms and spectrum holders due to concerns that it could interfere with plane altimeters, per Reuters.

• Up until this point, the target of similar mandated voluntary operating limits had been Verizon and AT&T.
• The pair has each spent tens of billions of dollars to acquire licenses to deploy C-band 5G, which is also known as the “Goldilocks spectrum” due to its ability to deliver fast speeds over long distances.

Big picture: The FAA’s new push to limit smaller C-band operators is an attempt to set a standard across the industry, according to Jason Leigh, research manager for mobility and 5G research at IDC.

“[Verizon and AT&T] are not the only two players with C-band spectrum. I think the FAA is starting to say, well, what about everybody else that [is] not part of this voluntary agreement?” he said. “They’re trying to just codify it a little bit to say, ‘Okay, we’ve got the two big dogs in the house that have agreed to do this, but we want to make sure that everybody abides by it.’”

Read about the latest round of C-band bans here.—JM

About a week ago, we published the results of an exclusive survey showing what US city residents think of smart-city tech.

And exactly one week ago, we asked all of you to weigh in on one such question: Do you think it’s important for cities to invest in emerging tech? After just under 1,600 responses, the results are in:

• Precisely 80% of respondents said yes, it is important to invest in emerging tech, while  ~12% of respondents said no, and another ~9% said they weren’t sure.
• Meanwhile, according to the Emerging Tech Brew-Harris Poll survey we pubbed last week, 87% of US city residents think such investment is important.

Big picture: Despite the general consensus among US city residents that investing in new tech is worthwhile for cities to do, there were some pretty big differences in the levels of enthusiasm, awareness, and engagement with smart-city tech, depending on who you ask or what you ask about.

• Some tech, like public wi-fi, had broad appeal, while others, like autonomous vehicles, had more lukewarm support.
• Younger city residents were more likely to use smart-city tech than older ones.
• Residents of smaller US cities were a lot less enthusiastic about smart-city tech than those who live in large cities.

Dive further into the results of our survey here.—DM

This week’s poll: Do you think Twitter will succeed or fail under Elon Musk?

Succeed
Fail
Somewhere in the middle
‍ IDK

Stat: Amazon claims it has “over a thousand” Rivian EV delivery vans in operation. Amazon is both an investor in and a customer of Rivian; it plans to take delivery of 100,000 Rivian EV(ans) by 2030.

Quote: “There’s an abundance of talent right now, because of these layoffs…A few years ago, there was no way we could’ve attracted candidates like this.”—Kathy Zhu, CEO and co-founder of Streamline AI, to the WSJ on startups benefiting from layoffs at larger tech companies

Read: An in-depth interview with the founder of Mastodon, as tens of thousands sign up for the app in search of a Twitter alternative.

New in town: What should security and IT pros know about cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM)? In a world of repackaged and renamed tech, see why CAASM stands out from the crowd. Get Axionus’ new ebook here.*

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Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Why Shutterstock execs decided to embrace DALL-E 2
• A faster energy transition could mean trillions of dollars in savings
• From Alphabet to Amazon, tech giants aim to do more with less