GOING GREEN IS ALL ABOUT THE GREENBACKS FOR THE WELL-CONNECTED: A reality check on electric school buses. “The last thing to consider is the time it will take us taxpayers to realize the savings on electric school buses. If you figure an average of 16,000 miles per year (the high end estimate on yearly mileage for a bus), and include only the costs laid out here, the payback on electric is about 20 years. That number was startling to me because 20 years was the top end, best-case-scenario I could find for the life of the bus batteries. In other words, right as we’d start to realize the savings, the bus would stop working.”