On dependability, officials in White Plains give the buses, which were made by Lion Electric, a Quebec-based company, a passing grade. “So far, so good,” said Sergio Alfonso, the district’s director of transportation. “We always expect issues with new technology, but we haven’t seen anything out of the ordinary yet.”

In 2016, in contrast, three school districts in Massachusetts bought three buses from Lion Electric under a state-funded pilot project. The buses had repeated battery and software failures, and parts often had to be shipped to Canada for repairs, putting the vehicles out of commission for lengthy spells.

Lion Electric says it has learned from those early missteps and is training mechanics in White Plains, as well as helping to establish a service center nearby in New Jersey for more serious problems.

White Plains was only able to afford its five buses with outside help. National Express received a state grant that offset $120,000 of the cost of each vehicle. The company then set up a partnership with Consolidated Edison, the local electric utility, which agreed to chip in another $100,000 per bus.

In return, Con Ed gets the right to use the buses to help power the grid in the summer, when school is out and the vehicles sit idle. Their batteries would store electricity when demand is low and discharge it during peak hours.

The grid project is one of the first of its kind, and, in theory, could be a way for utilities to help finance electric school buses elsewhere in the state. As New York builds more solar and wind power, it will need lots of new energy storage. The utility plans to test the buses’ batteries next summer to see how they hold up under heavy use and to check whether the economics work.