The California Department of General Services has created a master contract for the purchase of BYD electric school buses. From the press release:
BYD | RIDE announced that its Type A and Type D school buses have been added to the California Department of General Services (DGS) statewide electric school bus contract. Customers interested in adding a zero-emission BYD | RIDE to their fleets can purchase directly from the contract without releasing their own request for proposal (RFP).
The California DGS is an umbrella contract with no guaranteed purchase amount. It can act as a master contract with a base period of two years with options to extend three additional one-year periods.
What this means is that school districts can directly purchase these buses rather than having to go through the RFP process. That doesn’t require the school districts to purchase electric buses but it makes it easy to do if they wish to acquire them.