Together, Donnie Owle and Katie Tiger are a two-person school bus electrification team, keeping Cherokee, North Carolina at the leading edge of quickly-developing electric school bus technology.

Owle is the service manager of the Cherokee Boys Club, contracted to transport students of Cherokee Central School. Katie Tiger is the air quality program supervisor for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. After bringing the first electric school buses to North Carolina, they’re now working on multiple fronts to test and build out this new technology.

Before working as a service manager for the boys club, Owle spent 20 years doing automotive work for the Ford Motor Company, a longtime leader in alternative fuels. In 2008, the nonprofit tribal entity bought its first biodiesel school bus, and in 2012 it received a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant to build a biodiesel production facility.

Preschoolers at Cherokee Central Schools took the first electric school bus ride in the state in March 2022. “Within that first month, we noticed a 50 percent cost reduction, just in fuel usage and charging,” Owle said. “So what was normally taking $1,000 to buy diesel fuel for a bus, we were paying $400-$500 to charge that bus.”

As of early 2024, Owle estimated that electric school buses had saved about $60,000 in fuel costs. Now, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has funded the purchase of 15 more electric school buses, allowing the electrification of the whole fleet and the ability to test technologies at scale.

The Cherokee Boys Club runs 21 school bus routes on about 56,000 mountainous acres in the Qualla Boundary south of Smoky Mountain National Park. “All of our buses do both runs on one charge daily,” Owle said. “The mountains do take a little more power.”

Newer-model electric buses will be directed toward the mountainous routes for testing. “The mountains do take more power, but they also gain more power in the mountains, with regenerative braking,” Tiger added.

Cherokee Boys Club has three of the only mechanics in the state licensed to work on Carolina Thomas electric buses. The Boys Club functions as a satellite dealer for Carolina Thomas and can even do warranty work on the EVs.

As these electric vehicle mechanics learn new technology skills, Cherokee Boys Club hopes to Cherokee High School students in an emerging career field. “We’re hoping this becomes something that is normal to them,” Tiger said.

A solar canopy above the buses provides power, and Cherokee Boys Club is currently participating in a Duke Energy vehicle-to-grid (V2G) pilot project. Testing new technology involves trial and error.

“I think one bus lost connection one time over the weekend, and I had to come down and rehook it,” Owle said. “But it’s actually working out pretty good right now. When we first started, it wouldn’t even work. We’re getting there.”

The next phase of Owle and Tiger’s “Native Electric” will use another EPA grant to build a microgrid for the school buses. Tiger’s dream is to do a DC backbone microgrid, which doesn’t require a conversion to and from AC power. “There are very, very few in the country,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not do-able.”

While most chargers currently have converters built inside, Owle and Tiger want to stay at the forefront of emerging technologies. “We do think it’s the way of the future,” she said. “It just makes sense. Why convert if you don’t have to, especially if the microgrid is just to charge the buses?”

Emerging vehicle charging technologies might seem only adjacent to air quality monitoring, but Tiger sees vehicle electrification as a way to improve air quality. “All of this does improve local air quality,” she said. “It took me a while to figure that out, but I am making a difference in trying to prepare this community for the future.”

She said that air quality monitoring in the Qualla Boundary has shown improvements in the past two years, and electric school buses contribute to improvements. “It’s my passion,” Tiger said. “I knew I was very interested in alternative energy from the get-go, and there were so many opportunities with all this federal funding from IRA and ARPA that it would be stupid not to think big.”

Tiger has been monitoring air quality for EBCI for 17 years, after moving to Cherokee from California with her husband, an EBCI citizen. “In my opinion, Cherokee is the best place on earth,” she said. “This is God’s country. Cherokee people have been here for thousands and thousands of years, and there’s so much history and culture connected to this land.

“It’s my job to help try to preserve this, and one way of doing that is preparing for our changing climate and preparing the community,” she continued. “That’s what Donnie and I are trying to do with these electric school buses, and with this microgrid, just make this a healthier place for the children, a healthier riding environment for the children and for the bus drivers.”