Electric Vehicle Fall 2014 Quarterly Discussion Webinar (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Electric Vehicle Fall 2014 Quarterly Discussion Webinar presented on Sept. 29, 2014.

COORDINATOR: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star, 1. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

Your host for today's call is Ms. Linda Bluestein. Thank you. You may begin.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Hi, this is Linda Bluestein, and I'm the co-director of the Department of Energy Clean Cities program.

And I want to thank you for attending our quarterly electric vehicle discussion webinar. And we routinely do these types of educational webinars every quarter to keep our Clean Cities stakeholders and s up-to-date, as well as other stakeholders out there, on the latest with electric vehicle developments in the United States.

And today we have some important territory to cover and an outstanding lineup of speakers and information. We are going to talk today about a couple of different things.

First, Clean Cities has had an emphasis on community readiness for plug-in electric vehicles and we awarded funding to 16 plug-in electric vehicle community readiness projects in 2011 and barrier reduction grants for alternative fuel vehicles in 2012.

These have yielded plans, training and education, code development, and other projects at the community level. You can find the results of the 16 PEV Community Readiness Awards on our website, along with a guide to lessons learned, that helps the reader sift through the many templates and plans on our website.

In keeping with our community readiness emphasis today we will be looking at a crucial element of PEV readiness that depends on state's voluntary adoption of codes.

These codes, which cover weights and measures, help protect consumers and businesses by providing transparency and helping to promote uniform transactions that are subject to the same methods of measurement.

Our first speaker, Tina Butcher of NIST, will give us an overview of her agency and the Weights and Measures Handbooks that states may voluntarily adopt.

Jim Creevy of the National Electric Manufacturers Association represents charging manufacturers and works with a broad industry supporting the NIST handbooks and their adoption in states.

Clean Cities s and others may be interested in working with their states to adopt approved Handbook 130 and the pending Handbook 44 once it's approved by vote next year. Jim will explain to you how to do that.

Third, we'll hear from Dan Welch and Nick Nigro with C2ES. They have been asked to provide a market overview and they'll provide some interesting and informative market snapshots and ideas, as well as some updates from follow-on work by some of our PEV Readiness awardees.

Each presentation should take somewhere around roughly 15 minutes, but we're going to hold all of the questions until the end. But I want you to feel free to type them into the Q&A on your screen as you think of them throughout the presentation so we don't lose your thought in the process.

All presentations, as well as a transcript and recording of the webinar will be on the Clean Cities website. And if you will look at the very last slide, when Dan and Nick get to the last slide, there will be a listing of all of the resources with Web links on it to the Community Readiness information and to all of our websites and important areas, in addition to that, for you to be able to look these things up on the Web.

Well our first speaker is Tina Butcher and she has worked with NIST for 26 years. And she has a great perspective because not only has she been working with NIST for many years; she's a Supervisory Physical Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. But she also worked at the state level as a Field Inspector for Weights and Measures in Maryland.

So she is going to give us an overview of NIST, and the Weights and Measures processes, and code development. And she has served as technical advisor to a number of legal metrology technical committees, including the National Conference on Weights and Measures Specifications and Tolerances Committee and several sectors of the National Type Evaluation Technical Committee and others. And she is currently Chairman of the NIST U.S. National Workgroup on Electric Vehicle Refueling and Submetering.

So, Tina, you can get started now.

TINA BUTCHER: Thank you, Linda. As Linda noted, the two main areas that I am going to be covering this afternoon are the legal metrology overview in the U.S. And I'll just digress a moment before we get started to let you know that the word metrology is a fancy word for the science of measurement.

And a lot of people confuse it with meteorology, but our sister agency, NOAA, certainly deals with the weather, but this is the science of measurement and it's specifically the science of measurement as it applies in the commercial marketplace.

So I'm going to give you an overview of what that looks like in the U.S., how NIST interfaces in that area, as well as some of the ways that standards are developed in weighing and measuring equipment.

The second portion of my presentation is to give you an update on some activities going on with the NIST U.S. National Working Group on electric vehicle fueling and submetering. And that group is comprised of regulators, industry, and equipment users, so I'll give you an update on what's happening in that vein.

So let me start out by giving you a perspective. When we talk about legal metrology it covers a wide range of equipment and applications. Metrology is the, as I said earlier, the science of measurement, and specifically it's the science of measurement as it applies to commercial transactions.

So when we think of weights and measures we're looking at everything from the vehicle scale that weighs trucks full of sand and gravel, to grocery store scales, to gasoline service stations that measure the quantity of fuel going into your gasoline tank, or perhaps delivering to your home heating oil—home heating tank. It can also include taxi meters, fabric measuring devices, a whole host of weighing and measuring equipment.

In addition, we cover pre-packaged commodities. So in the grocery store when you're buying packages of corn flakes, or shaving cream, or even price scanning accuracy, weighing and measure—weights and measures officials cover this whole gamut of measurement applications.

In addition, we also look at equipment that's used to test the devices that are used to make these measurements. So in the upper left screen you'll see equipment that's used to measure propane that's going to a propane meter, or home heating oil. In the middle of the screen you'll see examples of test weights that are used to apply to scales, such as grocery store scales; jeweler scales; or as in the lower left hand corner, vehicle scales. So we have to have those standards as well.

With regard to how NIST interfaces with this let me start at something very fundamental and that's the constitution. The U.S. Constitution actually charges Congress with the job of what is called fixing the standard of weights and measures.

And what that translates into is uniformity. Uniformity in weighing and measuring values in the practices that are used in the marketplace in the areas that we just looked at, and then more importantly providing traceable—traceability back to some national standard of weight, length, or volume. And that's where NIST comes in.

We like to look at this chain of what we call traceability and we want this chain to be unbroken. So NIST is the agency that's charged with maintaining the country's national standards for things like volume, length, mass, and so on.

And we actually make measurements here that are traceable back to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. It's the equivalent of NIST for the whole world. So NIST makes those measurements and makes sure that we have some connection with the measurements to the international standard.

And then in turn we have to disseminate that measurement out into the marketplace. We have a network of laboratories within each state that maintain state standards, state primary standards, and in turn they use those standards to create working standards that are used by officials to go out and check gas pumps, or check the vehicle scales that we saw pictures of earlier.

So they're using those standards that are directly linked back to the state, and then back to NIST. And then in turn those pieces of equipment, like the grocery store scales; the vehicle scale; the taxi meter; or in the case where we're very interested in, the electric vehicle refueler, making those measurements that will be used to charge consumers for goods or services that they're buying or selling.

And we want to make sure that we have that chain all throughout these different levels to make sure that those measurements are consistent and are traceable back to NIST measurement.

One complication in that chain is that while NIST has the obligation, or charge, to try to fix that standard the National Institute of Standards and Technology is not a regulatory agency. In the areas of weights and measures regulation it's mainly a state and local government responsibility.

There is a state program in every state and in many cases states also have, in addition, city, county, townships, etc., that are also responsible for regulating weighing and measuring equipment, or pre-packaged commodities.

There are also some federal laws and regulations in some specific areas, such as the Packers, their regulation of things like livestock auctions in certain applications, as well as grain inspection for importing and exporting of grain. So there are a few federal areas, but in terms of weighing and measuring equipment it's largely a state and local government responsibility.

That complicates matters a little bit in the sense that in order to make sure that it's easy for businesses to compete and consumers to understand what they're buying or selling it's difficult when you have many different jurisdictions applying the requirements.

So one of the things that our office has to do is to try to encourage states to do things the same way. In order to do that we have a number of key activities that we undertake. We provide a lot of technical support to committees, workgroups; we get inquiries from weights and measures officials, from manufacturers of equipment, or pre-packaged commodities.

So we do a lot of interfacing and interacting with technical areas. We work with the community to develop field inspection and laboratory procedures, and I'll touch on this point a little bit later on with regard to electric vehicle refueling. We also work with each individual state metrology laboratory to make sure that their laboratory capabilities are up-to-speed and current.

And we do a lot of training. We train inspectors and service people in the inspection and testing of weighing and measuring equipment, ranging from grocery store scales, to grain moisture meters, to vehicle scales, and so on.

And we also have a very intensive laboratory metrology training program where we train state meteorologists and also industry meteorologists. Many industry people maintain laboratories in their processing plants, or they do calibration work on their own, so we do a lot of work and training with those people.

We also work internationally with international standards developing organizations, such as the International Organization of Legal Metrology. Our primary goal in working with those organizations is to try to eliminate trade barriers to the U.S. that might be created by inconsistent requirements for weighing and measuring equipment or packaged commodities.

We also publish a lot of documents. I'll give you a couple of examples later on in my presentation. And we disseminate those publications and standards to as many people as we can get them to with the idea is that it might encourage people to use those as one single uniform standard.

Additionally, we do operate the U.S. Metric Program out of our office. That program is designed to encourage and support companies that want to move into the metric methods for buying and selling. So we more or less facilitate that and let the marketplace drive the acceptance of metric one way or another.

And one of the publications that is important right now in terms of electrical vehicle refueling is the handbook called NIST Handbook 130. The official title of it is at the top of the screen. I won't read that. You can read that yourself.

But the key part behind this and the other publication that I'm going to talk about is for—to promote uniformity. This handbook contains uniform laws and regulations that will serve as a template. So weights and measures jurisdiction could go to this document and if they want to do an active weights and measures law, or a regulation in their state, they can use what's in there as a sample or a model and then tailor it to meet the individual needs of their jurisdiction.

So in terms of adopting Handbook 130 some states will adopt what's in there by—in its entirety; they may adopt it by reference; they may use it as a guideline and tailor it and modify certain sections to meet their own individual needs for their industry, as well as their consumers; and some don't use it at all. But Handbook 130 has been adopted by a number of states.

And one important regulation is the Uniform Regulation for Method of Sale. That regulation, that model regulation, defines how products can be bought and sold. And in our area of interest, in particular in our call today, it's how can electrical energy be bought and sold.

So I'll mention one of the things that the U.S. National Working Group has done with regard to the method of sale. It's made quite a few strides already. I'll return to that later in my presentation.

So Handbook 130 is setting out the framework for how jurisdictions enact or adopt laws and regulations related to metrology, again measurement in the commercial marketplace.

Another handbook is called NIST Handbook 44 and this handbook outlines requirements for weighing and measuring equipment, like the grocery store scale, the vehicle scale, the home heating oil meter, the gasoline dispenser at the vehicle service stations.

It too is a product of the weights and measures community. We publish it annually as a way to encourage uniformity for weighing and measuring equipment requirements.

And Handbook 44 is actually adopted a lot more universally than Handbook 140. It has been adopted by all states in the U.S. Many states adopt it by reference, meaning they adopt the current addition. Other states may incorporate the requirements into their individual law or regulation.

And it's important to note that not all states use the same edition. So at any point in time even though the current edition is going to be 2015, I actually took a picture of the cover of what's being—getting ready to be published in the next month, but the current edition is 2014.

Many states have adopted the 2014 edition, but some states are operating on the 1997. So you'll see a range of adoption in terms of the year that they're following, but by and large all of the states have adopted Handbook 44 and do follow it.

So as I said, it includes requirements for weighing and measuring equipment for things such as, how accurate does equipment have to be; what actual provisions that a user of the equipment, or operator of the equipment, would have to follow. For example, is a receipt required for a transaction, what kinds of information has to be provided to a consumer, how do you provide adequate security for the equipment, and so on?

So Handbook 44 lays all of that out for the manufacturer to follow, for the inspector to follow when he or she is inspecting the equipment, and also for the user to follow when they're using the equipment.

So as I mentioned earlier, because NIST is not a regulatory agency we had to find a way to encourage uniformity across the country. So way back in 1905, this gives you an idea of how long ago this process started, we created an organization called the National Conference on Weights and Measures. And we do like our acronyms, so you'll probably see us refer to this in some of the later slides as NCWM, National Conference on Weights and Measures.

The National Conference on Weights and Measures is a collaboration. We don't go off into a room and develop requirements and then come back out and tell the community, "Here are the requirements." Instead this is a participatory process where people that are affected by the regulations and requirements come together and they debate and they develop the requirements to try to come up with standards that would be meet the needs of the community.

They developed a voluntary standard in the sense that the National Conference is not regulatory either, but it's hoped that the states will take these requirements back and adopt them in their own jurisdiction.

Now I do want to note that the only voting—the only people with voting power in the National Conference are the regulatory officials. So as a federal government official I can't vote, industry can't vote, but we do have a voice. You can go, you can comment, you can say, "This works for me." or, "This doesn't work for me." or, "Hey, I have an idea for an alternative." And so the opportunity is there to do that.

We are authorized to work in cooperation with the states to secure that uniformity and we operate under the NIST Organic Act, as it was amended in 1950 to do that. And the bottom line is we also have authority for ensuring traceability. If you recall back to that big long chain that showed you the picture of, we help ensure traceability of the measurements that are coming out of the state laboratories and into the marketplace.

To give you an overview as far as sort of a diagram in terms of how standards are developed in the weights and measures community, this flow chart gives you an idea that from the time that an issue is initiated it's submitted to a number of different regional associations that get together and talk about various requirements that have been proposed for weighing and measuring equipment; for pre-packaged commodities; anything related to legal metrology, inspection and testing.

So the regionals look at the proposals, they debate, they actually take a vote, and then they forward items to the national committees by the first of November each year. The recommendations are published in a publication called National Conference on Weights and Measures Publication 15 that comes out in December.

And then there's a period for people to look through it, think about the proposals, and then at an interim meeting in January there are open hearings. And one by one each of those proposals is debated and discussed and everybody that has an interest in an item is welcome to get up and comment, you can write a letter in, you can send an email comment. But the opportunity is there to comment on any proposal that's being considered.

At that meeting the national committees develop proposed requirements in the terms of recommendations. They may have an item that's ready for a vote and they may have items that need more work and they publish their results in a report called Publication 16, which comes out in about April.

There's a comment period. The regional weights and measures associations look at the requirements again and then in July of each year a voting session is heard, which also accompanied again by open hearings. A final report is published about October and then the handbooks, including the two that I mentioned earlier, are published in November of each year and then they're adopted by states and then enforced after that point. So it is a very lengthy process, over which time occurs a lot of analysis, discussion, issue development, variations in the proposals, and so on.

The—in order to propose changes there are requirements that come on the scene that are new, so it might be an item that has never been considered before. They are generally proposed for addition into Handbook 130, or Handbook 44, or one of the other handbooks that we deal with.

And in considering any proposed change we look at things like, how does it impact the stakeholder, how cost effective is it going to be, will consumers understand the requirement as it's going to be implemented? We also look for input from other peers, such as in this case, like NIST; industry; manufacturers; organizations; even internationally we look at how other people would handle similar situations.

Proposals are submitted to regional weights and measures associations and technical committees using a Form 15. So these will be new proposals. With regard to existing proposals, comments can be accepted on any that's being considered by the National Conference on Weights and Measures at the open hearings for the conference, at the regional weights and measures associations.

But if you're not able to attend those meetings you can also write letters, or emails, or comment on an online position forum that the conference maintains. Additionally, and I think Jim may speak to this a little bit later, you can also contact the state regulator in your own weights and measures jurisdiction. There is a list of state directors that do have regulatory authority over weighing and measuring equipment in each state. And I've listed the Web address here where you can find that list and look up your own individual state.

So I'll get to the second portion of my presentation and that is the U.S. National Working Group on Electric Vehicle Fueling and Submetering. That's a long title, so normally I'm going to refer to this as the Work Group.

The Work Group was established in August 2012. It is composed of weights and measures officials that have regulatory authority, as well as companies that manufacture equipment for electric vehicle refueling, and suppliers.

The key objectives of this group is to first of all develop method of sale requirements, which they have successfully done. The Proposed Method of Sale was adopted in 2013 and so that's been on the books for about a year. And we're now in the process of looking at requirements for the electric vehicle refueling equipment.

I'm pleased to say that the Work Group recently completed a draft code, which has been submitted to the fall weights and measures associations. Two have already reviewed the draft code and have successfully adopted it and in terms of their recommendation, it won't be put up for adoption until next July, but they supported it. We have two more to go yet, that's the southern and the northeast regional, so we're working our way through that region—those regions.

We also have recommended changes to the Timing Devices Code. There are some requirements that would apply to any timing feature that would be on an electric vehicle refueler that would be used to charge, in addition to the electrical energy that's measured by the device.

We have some other work after we're done, these two areas, that has yet to be undertaken. And that is to look at applications, such as fleet sales and price contract sales, and then we will also be looking at other commercial electric meters that are used in submetering applications.

And I want to note that these are only meters that are under weights and measures authority. These are not your home utility meters that are under the authority of, let's say, a public utility commission or other agency.

We also are working in test—on test equipment and test procedures to test these electric vehicle refuelers. We have a subcommittee that's chaired by Ted Bond from the Argonne National Laboratory, as well as several other members of the Work Group. So that subcommittee has been doing a really great job developing requirements for the equipment that will be used to test these devices.

Thus far we've spent a lot of time on the draft Handbook 44 Code. I kind of went through the timeline with you already, so I won't repeat a lot of this. We are waiting for all of the regions to weigh in and we hope that the draft code will be designated as a voting with the possibility that it may be voted on in July 2015.

With regard to the purpose of the requirement, the overarching concern is to make sure that the transactions are transparent to both the buyer and the seller. We want to make sure that the consumer understands what he or she is purchasing, how much energy did they receive, what are they going to be paying for it, other conditions of the transaction, and so on.

And likewise we want businesses to be able to have an understanding of what the requirements are because that's the only way that they can compete fairly. We want to make sure that consumers can do value comparisons from station to station, or maybe even with refueling their vehicle in their home environment.

In the proposed code we require that the dispenser be of the computing type so that it does show the consumer, as he or she is purchasing the electricity, that—how much they're going to be paying for it. And then there are also requirements for providing a receipt. And that receipt can be electronic. It doesn't have to be a paper copy. So there are requirements for receipts as well.

The equipment must be accurate at the car connector. We are aware that there could be some loss in the cabling or the connection from the dispenser to the car. But the accuracy has to be all of the way up to the car connector.

We are working quite a bit on the test procedures, so we do expect some of the note section, which deal primarily with the test procedures and test requirements, we expect that some of those will be refined as we go on.

With regard to the equipment that's going to be used to test these devices, the subcommittee has been working quite diligently. There's been a lot of work to-date. Prototypes have actually been developed. I don't have the expertise on the individual technical nitty gritty of the features, but I've listed the specs that were provided to me by Ted Bond and his subcommittee.

The hoped for target is they're going to be in the neighborhood of about $1,000, plus accessories, as far as the raw materials cost is concerned. And we've already had at least one article already produced by Argonne National Laboratory as a prototype just to make sure that we can get it working and it's feasible.

Ted has also provided some pictures of what's been worked on thus far just to kind of give you an idea of the size, and shape, and what it might end up looking like. So this is where we are so far in terms of test equipment, as well as test procedures.

Once the procedures are defined very—in very—much more detail we'll be publishing what's called an Examination Procedure Outline. We do have our existing sources that we can draw upon. The State of California has an Examination Procedure Outline that's been in use for quite some time, so we're hoping to be able to borrow quite a bit from that.

We will be doing the testing as used, or I should say the weights and measures officials will be doing the testing as used. And we also recognize the need to come up with laboratory procedures for testing new equipment, such as in-type evaluation, or even rebuilt meters. We also are—have an eye to safety and practicality, making sure that these things will work out in the field environment.

I've provided contact information. My name and number are up there as the Chair of the Work Group. As far as the nitty gritty technical aspects of this work I've also included Juana Williams of our office. Her telephone and email contact information is up there as well.

And that wraps it up for me, Linda. And if there are any questions I believe you're taking questions at the end of all of the presentations.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Yes and but don't forget to—if you want to go ahead and type in a question, if you have an online question that we can ask later on, it will help hold your thought later in the webinar.

Next we're going to introduce Jim Creevy, he's the Director of Government Relations for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. Jim represents NEMA members interest in the areas of grid modernization, industrial energy efficiency, transportation electrification and cyber security.

He communicates NEMA policy recommendations to Congress, federal agencies, including ours, EPA, FERC, and NIST, and state government officials.

And prior to joining NEMA Jim worked for six years in various capacities in the U.S. House of Representatives, mostly recently as Legislative Director for Representative Ben Chandler from Kentucky. And he earned a Bachelor's Degree in Economics from Georgetown University in 2001.

And, Jim, you can take it from here. I do want to mention that on the very last slide in the third presentation there is a link from our website that will take you to the NIST side with the NIST Handbooks, so keep that slide in your computer.

JIM CREEVY: All right thank you, Linda. Good afternoon everyone. So NEMA is the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. We have got over 400 companies we represent. They manufacture all sorts of electrical equipment, including light bulbs, and electric motors, and wire and cable, and transformers. There are also medical imaging technologies, like MRI machines. So we have a very broad scope. One of our product scopes is electric vehicle supply equipment. So that's the capacity I'm here joining you today in.

I know you're focused on getting your communities ready for plug-in electric vehicles and believe me we are too at NEMA. I will cover today our input to the NIST processes and I'll also share some additional information on other codes and standards activities that are taking place outside of NIST that your s may want to promote in your communities.

So here is a list of the NEMA EVSE manufacturers. Now it's important to note that some of these folks are assembling the entire EV charger, and others are components, and still others are owners of the network.

NEMA's goal is to grow the market for electric vehicles and their requisite equipment through public policy, but also through technical standards and codes to make sure that consumers have interoperability, and costs are reduced, that the greatest functionality is provided and it's all done safely.

So we are actually a standards developing organization. So we have a lot of electrical engineers here who participate in standards writing activities within the association, but then they also promote that to be adopted by the country, as well as internationally. So I am not one of those electrical engineers, so you're welcome for that.

So I had planned this slide as a stumper, but I think Tina has stolen my thunder on this front, but the question being what do all of these things have in common? Of course the answer being that they're all regulated under NIST Handbook 130, and I supposed Handbook 44 as well in the method of sale.

So for the record, because I know you're curious, the food wrap has to be sold by length and width, as well as area in square meters; the sod has to be sold by the square meter, square foot, or square yard; and pickles can—you can get pickles two ways, in liquid measure, fluid ounces, or if you're buying them from a barrel you can buy them on at a time, so by count.

So what about EV charging? How does it have to be sold? This is a big change from past precedent. Until now utilities were the ones who were selling electricity. But EV's are really changing this landscape. And so this is, for the first time, why NIST and the National Conference on Weights and Measures is paying attention to this issue.

So from the very beginning of NEMA's involvement in the 130 process we were concerned about the approach to regulate EV charging. It looked too much to us like regulating gasoline pumps. So they—gas pumps are one of the best known things that the state weights and measurements offices regulate. You've all seen that sticker on the gas pump where the Commissioner of Agriculture certifies it and says that it's accurate.

But as you can see here we think that EV charging stations differ from gas pumps in a number of important ways. They can be summed up by these three things, so for time. Charges are longer than filling up your gas tank. They charge for hours at a time and the gas pump a transaction is done in a few minutes.

Location wise they are distant or they're isolated, often by themselves, scattered around town. And usually EV charging is not the primary focus of the host site, unlike a corner gas station. They're making money off of that and that's their business. Most of the public available charging stations are provided secondarily to their customers.

And they're often unattended. So there may be no person nearby with authority over that charging station on a regular basis. And finally revenue, it's smaller, as I mentioned, or we're not seeing charging stations on the side of the road. They're not cash cows at this point.

So when it comes to cost of them any additional cost can be a big deterrent. So we're trying to do our best to keep the costs down of this equipment so that more and more businesses and other hosts are encouraged to put charging stations out there. So that's why we think we need some new rules and we need to allow the full breadth of technology to play a role here.

So the gas pump is of course the most well-known of the weights and measures activity supported by NIST. And as I said, we were concerned that it looked too much like the gas pump regulation.

So NEMA recommended a different approach at the outset of this process two years ago. Unfortunately that approach was rejected by the National Conference on Weights and Measures. So we were left with this new method of sale, which I have described here, which it's basically the kilowatt hour, but it also allows for other fees for different services provided.

And that is an important phrase for NEMA since customers are really demanding more than just kilowatt hours of electricity. It's allowing companies to build businesses around EV charging and offering a product where you're charging your vehicles for, for instance, the amount of time, or through a membership fee.

And it's given customers all sorts of other benefits along with that charging like, a network that enables electronic payments; location services so you can find out where one is; you can reserve a charging station through your cell phone, for instance. So that phrase other fees is very important for us.

So even though we opposed it and we offered an alternative once it was adopted we decided that the certainty it provided and the consistency across states, if it were to be fully adopted, were worth it. So we are supporting adoption of Handbook 130 in all 50 states.

Okay so this other NIST Handbook is where all of the important details are really being worked out. So I mentioned why the EVSE is so different from the gas pump and these are some of the things that are being determined in Handbook 44.

So a couple of things, we're trying to make sure that tiny printers are not required to be inserted into each EVSE. Again, we're trying to keep the costs down so that more and more folks can put charging stations out there and give EV's, EV drivers, a place to go. You know, who would refill that printer with paper and ink? A lot of these are located so far away from people.

We didn't want to see any sort of mandate on how the transactions should occur in terms of cash or credit card. A lot of the companies out there are providing charging through a network all through the Internet, and cell phone apps, and that sort of thing.

The other benefit on the credit card front is that credit card transaction costs can be very significant, so we didn't want to see a regulation that forced adopters to have to have credit card charging.

One other issue, we supported the embedded meter, so there was some discussion about whether a utility grade meter should be required. The process with NIST allowed us to arrive at a place where we had an embedded submeter that was measuring the equipment and that's—the test equipment that you saw would be measuring the accuracy of that.

So those are a lot of things we didn't want to see in the handbook. On the other hand there are lot of important things that the customer should see and that the businesses who are hosting EVSE's should see, and something that the regulator wants to make sure are there. So you heard from Tina a good explanation of those, you know, in terms of accuracy, and the display, and electronic receipt.

So to give you a quick sense of how the whole process would work, and this could serve as a prelude to the next segment of my presentation, the electrical inspector will sign off on the installation of the charging station. Then the weights and measures folks would come out to make sure, and certify it, to make sure it was accurate.

So I will share with you fairly quickly some other technical activities that NEMA is working on outside of NIST that you might be aware of. So the first is that first and foremost we want to make sure that EVSE are safe. And the National Electrical Code is one way that we are working on that. This code is updated every three years, I believe, and the 2014 version has an expanded section on EVSE.

So this—it's basically a building code for electrical safety and so this allows any licensed electrician to do the installations according to the NEC safely and effectively. First we want to make sure that the equipment itself is constructed properly and is safe. So there are a number of UL standards out there now that reputable manufacturers are adhering to dealing with the safety of the EVSE.

And NEMA is also working on the issue of networking roaming and interoperability. This is going to allow EV drivers to charge their vehicles in the public at the public stations through a network like I was describing earlier. They want to know which chargers are available, they want to be able to reserve it and make a payment. And we're working on how it would work just like an ATM network where you don't need to be a member of that particular ATM or charging station to have access to it.

And then one other standard I will mention is one that is being done by the National Electrical Contractors Association, NECA. And they have got one for installing and maintaining EVSE. So again another standard that's guiding installations to make sure that it's done properly and safely.

So what can you all and your Clean Cities do to support all of this activity? I'll give you four things. The first one is an absolute must and, you know, it seems like this one is even required before the NIST regulation makes sense at all, and that is an exemption from utility regulation for resellers of electricity.

Right, so if we're reselling electricity to the public we don't want the Target store to be categorized as a utility. They're just providing you access to a charging station. So here the red states have not adopted some sort of law or regulation exempting these resellers. So if you are in one of those red states we have some work to do on that front.

All right next is asking your state to adopt 130 and 44. So certainly I described that NEMA is in full support of 130 as it currently stands and we're asking states to adopt it. As far as 44 we like the way it's drafted at this point and assuming there are no major changes to it we will be supporting its adoption at the national conference in 2015 and then its adoption by all of the states after that.

And number three, promoting EVSE Ready, this is simply construction buildings in anticipation of EVSE installation at some future date. So this is, I imagine, the sort of thing that many of you are working on in your home areas to make sure that buildings, as they are constructed today, are ready for EVSE. From our perspective this basically means running the wires to where the EVSE will be and making sure that there's enough electrical capacity to support the charging. Actual installation of EVSE are not necessarily required under EVSE Ready.

And the final thing is asking your state to adopt the most updated National Electrical Code. So I described that there's a new section on EVSE, but again NEC has adopted either state-by-state, or even within states, local jurisdiction in the so-called home rule states. So we're recommending that you contact the appropriate public official and ask that they adopt the 2014 version of the NEC.

All right and so I will end right there and thanks for the chance to present. I'll take questions at the end. Thank you.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Thanks very much, Jim and Tina. I think those are very enlightening about NIST and the process. And the relevant code work that you were discussion obviously fits nicely into our community readiness activities that we have through the Clean Cities program.

Next we're going to switch over to a little bit of discussion about the marketplace for electric vehicles. And we're working on that with C2ES, who developed the Lessons Learned Guide to Plug-In Electric Vehicle Readiness that very nicely went through the 16 awards that we granted in 2011 to stakeholders across the country.

And Nick Nigro and Dan Welch from C2ES, I am going to skip the introductions on them since we're a little bit time pressed and have them get started with their presentation where they'll be talking a bit about the market at present and the state of play of electric vehicles.

NICK NIGRO: Thanks, Linda. So like she said, Dan and I are going to talk to you all a little bit about the market and provide you an update on the Readiness Grants from a few years ago.

A little bit about my organization really quick in case you all aren't familiar with us, though I do see a lot of familiar names on the attendee list, so hello everyone. So C2ES is a small independent non-partisan non-profit. We're an NGO based out in Arlington, Virginia. We work on climate change and energy issues. We've been around since the late 90's and up until 2011 we were known as the Pew Center on global climate change.

And as Linda mentioned, we will be giving these kinds of updates to you all quarterly on the state of play for electric vehicles through a partnership that we have with the Clean Cities Program and with Argonne National Laboratory.

So for each of these webinars, or each of these quarterly updates, that we're going to be presenting to you all we're going to try to have a theme. And this quarter's theme is on the economic and business view of electric vehicles. I am going to talk about the market and technology state of play and Dan will get into the update on the Community Readiness Grant recipients.

And just to give you a little color on what I'll be talking about, you know, the auto industry is having a fantastic year for sales. It looks like they're going to have their best sales figures since 2006. Electric vehicles, on the upside, are more—priced more competitively than ever. Automakers are—have been lowering their prices in recent years and offering a lot of incentives.

Infrastructure is—has been expanding, but the—and becoming more dense in certain metropolitan regions, but the business case for providing charging is still very challenging. I'll provide some details about why that is and what things we—what folks might be able to do about it.

We have been talking a lot about standards, the network interoperability today, and that is certainly one of the reasons that's been hindering deployment of EV's and of charging infrastructure. And once I'm through with that I'll hand it over to Dan and he will give an update on some of the Readiness Grant recipients from a few years ago.

So over .25 million electric vehicles have been sold in the United States since late 2010. That's inarguably a remarkable achievement for alternative fuel vehicles in the country, especially ones that are powered purely by electricity.

Unfortunately that's still only 1% of new passenger vehicle sales worldwide, or nationwide, so it's still a very, very small share of the market. On the other hand, 19 different models from different manufacturers were sold throughout the country just last month, in August 2004, with the lion's share of that being sold in California, over 100,000.

The graph on the right gives you a sense of where we have come from and where we can expect to go in the near future. If present trends do continue we can expect nearly half a million electric vehicles to be on the U.S. roads by the end of—by around 2016.

And just for comparative purposes only, that is quite ahead of where hybrids were. That's for a number of reasons, including the fact that there are a lot more models available from different automakers and the second section of this slide, the incentives. Automakers have been offering these incentives aggressively in certain regions, lowering the price of EV's, making them more competitive with conventional vehicles.

Nissan, for example, is offering a $199 per month lease for the LEAF, which is very similarly priced to the—to its Altima conventional vehicle. And Mitsubishi and GM have both made significant price cuts in the last year in their electric vehicle offerings.

This slide is intended to give you a sense of how that distribution of the different EV's have gone out over the last few years. You can see that different automakers have focused on different technologies, with Ford, GM and Toyota primarily focusing on selling plug-in hybrid or extended range electric vehicles and most of the other automakers focusing on all electric, or battery electric, vehicles.

It's also noteworthy to see that nearly all of the automakers in this list have sold less than 5000 of those vehicles. So the concentration of the market is quite obvious among just a small number of automakers.

The other thing to note is on—in this data is on the right you can see that up until early 2013 extended range or plug-in hybrid electric vehicles consistently outperformed battery electric vehicles in monthly sales. That has changed as more automakers have introduced battery electric vehicles and tried to sell them in states around the country, with particular focus on California and the other zero emission vehicle states. Battery electrics have caught up and now from month-to-month you can see that they run more or less neck and neck.

This is a different view of that data to give you a sense of how valuable the sale of electric vehicles are to different automakers. On the X axis is the number of vehicle sales in August 2014; the Y axis is the share of electric vehicles to their—compared to the total sales of that automaker; and then the colors are for which technology that automaker has—they're predominantly selling.

One thing to note here, BMW clearly has the largest share of EV's amongst its total auto sales, which is remarkable considering the—it's i3 has only just been recently introduced. Nissan also over 2%, while with the rest of the automakers in the field all hovering around 1%, which is what EV's current take in the market is. Tesla is not on this. They're 100% EV's, so we didn't put them on this slide, just to make it easier for folks to see the distribution of different automakers.

And what you also can notice from here is in the bottom left corner there's a number of automakers that have less than 1% of their sales are EV's and they are selling less than 1,000, or around 1,000, per month.

So that's a quick run-through on the state of electric vehicle sales in the country. You can—now I'd like to talk a little bit more—a little bit about charging infrastructure, this Intensity Map where—is of Level 2 charging stations, AC Level 2 stations throughout the country. It gets darker as there is more of them.

One thing to notice here is it's—the concentration of charging stations is predominantly where population is, which is pretty intuitive, I think. But digging a little bit deeper and understanding the ratio of charging stations might be worth considering here.

Currently, as I mentioned earlier, there's almost .25 million EV's on the road. Breaking that down to the number of charging ports around the country that's a ratio of 14 electric vehicles for every Level 2 charging port for—in the public.

Research has been varied on what the need is for public infrastructure and the amount that's necessary, but it is consistently much lower ratio than what's currently out there. For instance, the National Research Council's 2013 report on light duty vehicles had an estimate of 2.5 electric vehicles for every public charging station, implying there's a significant shortage of public charging out there with the existing vehicle fleet.

And that could be one reason why electric vehicles have not been selling quite as well as people had originally hoped. And there's a lot of reasons why there isn't as much charging infrastructure out there and I'm going to provide some insights into why that might be in just a moment.

Before I do that though I wanted to also show DC Fast Charging. This is mostly for—this is for battery electric vehicles and it's critical for enabling travel. And what you can see with this Intensity Map is that there is no DC Fast Charging access for most of the country for PEV drivers.

Plainly if they're relying on this public charging infrastructure they can't get to where they would want to go. The ratio is significantly higher, 182 EV's for every DC Fast Charging port.

And here's where the compatibility issues are, really show. A lot of the charging stations that you can see that are scattered across the middle of the country, those are Tesla Super Chargers. Those are not accessible by Nissan LEAF, and BMW i3's, or other charging—the other two charging standards. And in addition many of the other charging stations in metropolitan regions are CHAdeMO only, meaning they only support the Nissan LEAF or the Mitsubishi I.

And that's a serious problem and the good news is that charging infrastructure providers have responded and new equipment that's been made available can support both the SAE Combo Charging Standard and the CHAdeMO Standard, but we have an issue when it comes to where we are today. There's a lot of stations out there that are only supporting one vehicle type or another.

So why don't we have more charging out there? What are the challenges, in particular focus around the business case? It's been very difficult to develop, constructing, a compelling and profitable business case for selling electricity as a transportation fuel.

And that's in part because electricity is a very efficient transportation fuel, it costs very low compared to gasoline even with current gasoline prices, and that's led to some failures of charging infrastructure providers in the last year. And it's currently unclear if the remaining charging providers will be successful.

There's some positive news to share about those remaining charging providers, including ChargePoint, which just raised another round of funding, over $20 million, in May of this past year. They're the largest service provider in the U.S. and have raised over $100 million from large venture capital firms and automakers, like BMW.

Another bright spot are the automakers themselves, are subsidizing charging costs to help sell vehicles. Nissan, Tesla, and BMW, in particular, have been investing in Fast Charging Networks. Tesla of course has its own that they build and operate; BMW is invested in ChargePoint; Nissan is investing in its own charging stations and Nissan is also working on the interoperability issue.

We were hearing earlier about the need to have standards so that these charging stations operate more like an ATM card. Nissan has taken the lead a little bit on that recently with its EZ Charge Program to get more interoperability and compatibility among the different charging networks.

Another thing that really can hinder deployment of charging infrastructure is regulations. We heard about this just a few moments ago, this is a different map that we have on our website, which I encourage you to visit, along with some of the other maps we have on electric vehicle policy, at c2es.org.

This shows who can own and operate an electric vehicle charging station in a state. There are barriers. It is unclear at this point how many states will handle this issue. And that kind of risk and uncertainty can hold back the investment in charging infrastructure and deployment of stations in many states.

Massachusetts and West Virginia are examples of places where they recently declared these service providers would not be regulated as utilities, meaning they're free to have third party providers, like NRG eVgo and ChargePoint operate in their states.

But the number of states where that is unclear far exceeds the number of states where it is clear. And that's a huge barrier to investment in public charging infrastructure that needs to be handled either through the state legislature, as is done in Maryland; or through regulatory bodies, as is done in California, and Washington, and other states.

Another way of helping try to overcome some barriers is improving the value proposition of electric vehicles. There are several ways of doing that. This is just a laundry list of ideas that we've come across recently. Each of these bullets are links. I encourage you to check out the work of these groups, like the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, and the Pacific Northwest National Lab, and others, on ways that you can improve the value proposition and capture some of the public benefits offered by EV's.

Just for example, the Renewable Fuel Standard in the EPA that requires a certain amount of renewable bio based fuels to be mixed into the transportation fuel system. Bio gas generated for electricity now qualifies for that program.

So that means electric service charging providers could generate credits for fueling electric vehicles and that could improve the business case for EV's. VEIC estimated that Vermont alone has enough bio gas to power 30,000 EV's, so this is not a small opportunity. It's a big opportunity and one worth exploring further.

Another is just grid services in general, whether it be demand response, controlling when the vehicle can be charged, or even putting power back into the grid from the vehicles batteries. There was just an article in the Wall Street Journal, either today or yesterday, highlighting some—highlighting the continued work at the University of Delaware, along with NRG and eVgo and PJM, the grid operator in this region, about doing grid services with EV's and how valuable it's been to the different—to the EV owners and the University of Delaware.

Okay now I am going to turn it back over to Dan to give you an update on the Readiness Grant recipients.

DAN WELCH: Thanks, Nick, and I'll try to be fast. Linda very capably gave an overview of the Community Readiness Grant Program, so I'll just let you know that what you're looking at here is a map of the grant community. And you can find that on the DOE Clean website, Clean Cities website, sorry.

So from this map we contacted four specific recipients because their plans and experiences addressed various economic and financial impacts from PEV market deployment. We spoke with the reps from the Northeast who managed a grant for 11 states and D.C. And we also spoke with reps from the Southeast, which it was South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, but for the sake of time we'll be focusing on the grant recipients from Ohio and Oregon.

The recipients we contacted stressed effectiveness of financial incentives on consumer PEV adoption, which you can see from the bullets up top. A few recipients also conducted economic impact analysis that estimate the net benefit that PEV has provided to local communities.

Education and outreach activities are also helpful to reducing uncertainty and familiarizing consumers with PEV's. Business can serve as strategic partners to creating PEV visibility and familiarity, while enabling employees and consumers to make use of expanded network charging stations.

So for a quick look at the state's snapshot up top here, the grant recipient you see is Drive Electric Ohio. At 4000 PEV's on the road Ohio is not a top selling state. When looking at station locations it's helpful to keep in mind that you can see here that all of the available DC Fast Chargers are actually only compatible with Tesla chargers.

Drive Electric Ohio did complete an Economic Impact Analysis that estimates a $1300 net benefit, which could bring enormous value to the region, depending on the assumptions used. To reiterate, this value is what each PEV could bring the state each year, while factoring in losses such as gasoline, taxes, and revenue.

There's not been any competing studies, but for those interested in the modeling process the valuation was determined using the IMPLAN Modeling Program. Several electric utilities have actually followed up with this studies in other regions and they're using this model to conduct similar analysis.

So as you can see here it says that incentives are an important aspect, not just for consumers, but also for manufacturing. The Readiness Plan, which you can find online, highlights neighboring states that offered incentives to PEV and manufacturers and successfully attracted industry. Indiana and Michigan both offer manufacturing tax incentives, for example, and they both attracted significant PEV manufacturing investments in the past five years.

Education and outreach are also very important to create a sense of comfort and to erase any misinformation. Many people have heard strange things about the small new cars that show up, that they can't reach highway speeds or they'll catch fire. But as soon as people get in the electric vehicles they're amazed and excited.

A persistent barrier that the Southeast encountered is the lack of options with vehicles. Potential PEV consumers might not all want small sedans. So that tells us that education, while useful, might be a limited tactic if consumers aren't interested in the vehicle and model type to begin with.

So Ohio currently has no incentives for PEV or charging infrastructure adoption. The $500 tax credit shown here is being considered by the state, but it might not provide much. That being said, Ohio is one of the only states in the vicinity that doesn't have any financial incentives for PEV acquisitions.

The Infrastructure Support Program is an converted Ethanol Grant Program. It's going to provide loans to competitive AFV station proposals, so that's not just electricity, but would also be hydrogen fuel sales or compressed natural gas. But the loan program has not yet started to actually consider new applications.

And this lack of any financial incentives is important because recent research from UC Davis shows that financial incentives really do move the meter for electric vehicle adoption. An interesting study in 2011 by Gallagher and Muehlegger showed that effective incentives addressed not only how much money is provided, but how the money is provided. A tax rebate, for instance, can be ten times as effective as a tax credit.

So Ohio, if we look at the $1,300 estimated net benefit to the state, the state could use that amount of money, or whatever amount the government may perceive as feasible and reliable, towards creating an incentive that would help develop its PEV market.

Georgia provides a great example of the power of incentives. The state is the number two market in the country with over 15,000 PEV's on the roads. The $5,000 tax credit is the primary reason for such success. According to the grant recipients we spoke with Georgia's other highly publicized incentive, Atlanta's HOV access, may not actually be that big of a driver. Only an estimated 50% of the eligible PEV's have even registered for the HOV tags, which aren't actually that expensive.

So Drive Electric Ohio is still continuing to smooth the way for PEV adoption. One essential action from the Readiness Plan has been to identify ways of engaging municipal leaders. Drive Electric Ohio is now helping tailor its plan to major municipalities needs by working with the local leaders.

Here you'll see that the grant recipient in Oregon started the Drive Oregon initiative. You'll see in the state's snapshot that Oregon has a slightly higher PEV deployment, with a very high number of publicly available Fast Chargers.

But for comparison California has 173 Fast Charging locations, which includes 17 Tesla locations; Washington has 44 Fast Charging locations, including 4 Tesla stations; Georgia has only 20 Fast Charging locations, and it includes 3 Tesla stations. And I don't think I actually note that there are five Tesla stations in Oregon.

You may have seen in the previous slide on Ohio actions, but Drive Oregon, like Drive Electric Ohio, also considers Ride and Drive events to be tremendous assets for education and outreach. They find that consumer familiarity with the new technology is really important and reduces fears and uncertainties. In fact every grant recipient we spoke to reported some antidotal evidence of Ride and Drive success.

Now quantifying the success has been a bit more difficult. A California Bay Area initiative, for instance, the Experience Electric Program, is running an initiative to do just that. They're hosting a survey program of Ride and Drive participants and following them for months to see how many rides actually translate into new PEV buyers. So hopefully we'll have some more quantifiable information on Ride and Drives for our next webinar.

Oregon is also supporting a local economic impact study to show the value created by PEV deployment in the area and that will also hopefully be due out any day, so that could be shared around. But the study follows up on a report on the economic analysis of PEV deployment in Oregon State and also uses IMPLAN, which is the same modeling software that Ohio used.

And also similar to Ohio's experience, Oregon has found that incentives are a very valuable policy for increasing market deployment. As one representative aptly stated from Oregon, "Any time you throw money on the hood of a car people will be interested." So interestingly, Oregon did not offer vehicle tax credits or rebates, but the state is still quite successful in PEV deployment.

Strong PEV deployment may be a function of Oregon's robust charging network. Oregon has the highest availability of Fast Charging per capita than any other state. For instance, by way of comparison, California, which is famous for its high number of PEV's, has just over twice as many charging locations in a state with ten times that people.

So on the low end of the comparison Georgia has 2 Fast Charging stations per 1 million people; California has 4.5; Washington, just north of 6.5; and Oregon has over 18 Fast Charging stations per 1 million people.

If you look at these slides later on the C2ES website you can see in the map of who can own or operate a charging station that only Oregon's Public Utilities Commission has permitted utilities to charge rate payers to fund charging infrastructure.

State investment in the West Coast Electric Highway also enables PEV drivers to travel most of the length of the West Coast, which helps to reduce the regularly cited barrier of range anxiety.

And select Fast Charging siting can be a valuable investment. Oregon is planning to leverage its unique features by placing charging stations along its scenic byways to promote sustainable tourism. For example, Oregon placed a Fast Charging station in a popular ski resort where it also promoted a Plug-in and Pinot event to visit wineries and charging stations.

The grant recipients in the Northeast have expressed that their member states are projecting how best to spend their resources by targeting key travel corridors that would enable PEV drivers to travel between large cities.

Oregon is continuing to grow momentum by contacting businesses and government leaders to promote PEV deployment charging networks. Latent interest in PEV's might not have an outlet, so to speak. PEV champions, such as executives or elected officials, can bringing charging points, financial incentives, or other ways of making PEV's accessible to broader populations.

A great example of such a PEV champion would be New York's Governor Cuomo. You may know that he instituted the Charge New York Program, which is building 3,000 charging stations across New York State and enabling drivers to invest in PEV's.

So that wraps up my section. Here are some additional resources that you can check out. Obviously there's the Clean Cities projects and a few of our own work as well. So, Linda, do you want to take over?

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Sure, thank you. I just want to point out that on that particular slide we've got, you know, information that links, like I said, over to the NIST Handbooks we discussed, that's the second to left orange bullet on there, and of course our webinar archives that holds all of the information about the recordings and the PowerPoint slides.

And I think I saw that one of the main questions being asked on the Q&A was, you know, will there be copies of the slides and will there be copies? We will have a recording, we will have a transcript of this, and we also will have copies of the slides on the website at that website address. So please bookmark all of these, if you can, and you'll have access to a lot of the great information that we've generated.

So, Sandra, do you want to—shall we get calls now in terms of questions and read the Q&A?

SANDRA LOI: Yes, absolutely. Operator, can we go ahead and open up the phone lines for questions?

COORDINATOR: Yes. If you would like to ask a question please press star, 1 on your phone at this time and when prompted please record your first and last name. Again that's star, 1 if you would like to ask a question. One moment please for your first question.

SANDRA LOI: Great thank you. And while we're waiting…

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay.

SANDRA LOI: Oh go ahead.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Oh I'm sorry, Sandra. If you could get started on maybe asking the questions that would be great.

SANDRA LOI: Sure I'll..

LINDA BLUESTEIN: That have come in.

SANDRA LOI: Yes, I can do that. We have one from Yuli Two. The question here is, California already banned electric charging of vehicles based on membership. How will this affect the NIST model of kilowatt per hour, plus other fees for services?

LINDA BLUESTEIN: I'm not sure if Jim or Tina could answer that?

TINA BUTCHER: This is Tina. I can give a try. I'll preface the answer by saying, first of all, that because we're not a regulatory agency it really is up to California to define what their requirements are and what would be in place.

However, I can speak to the approach that has been taken by the U.S. National Working Group in its development in the Handbook 44 draft code and that is that it recognizes that there may be fees for other services that are provided.

For example, if the owner or operator of a station wants to charge a fee for, I'll say, parking or for leaving your vehicle at the charging location for a period of time that there is a provision to charge for fees in addition to the electrical energy.

That would mean that you would have, for example, a metering of the electrical energy and there would be a charge for that, but then there could be separate fees assessed in addition to the electrical energy charges. So for example, you could charge based on the time parked or other services that might be provided for the vehicle.

SANDRA LOI: All right, Jim, did you have anything to add?

JIM CREEVY: I think Tina nailed it.

SANDRA LOI: Okay great. Do we have any questions on the phone line, Kendra?

COORDINATOR: We do. Our first question is from David Combes. Your line is open.

DAVID COMBES: Yes, question, has any work been done to provide a standard for communicating to the utility concerning the amount of charging that would be required in order to allow for sequencing of charging?

JIM CREEVY: I suspect that's a question for me. I don't know is my answer to you on that question.

DAVID COMBES: Actually that was a question for NIST because I would think that…

JIM CREEVY: Oh even better.

DAVID COMBES: …NIST issue.

TINA BUTCHER: Let me make sure I understand your question correctly. Are you talking about if I'm charging my vehicle from my home charger and there is some communication back to the utility company in terms of metering at my home? Is that what you're asking?

DAVID COMBES: Well it could also be a fleet, if you're plugged in with your fleet, so it doesn't have to be from a home, but yes.

TINA BUTCHER: Okay and then the second portion of that are you talking about reverse energy flow, like buying back from the vehicle?

DAVID COMBES: I wasn't going that far at this point. Right now I'm just looking at the issue of optimizing the sequencing of charging. I'm just curious to see if any work has been done as far as data communication flow back and forth to the utility in order to go optimize the grid.

TINA BUTCHER: Okay I'll do my best to answer the question. We haven't, in the Work Group's discussion of this, we haven't gotten down into nitty gritty details in terms of communication with, let's say, the vehicle, to the service provider, to the utility.

But there has been discussion about things like variable pricing and rate changes, so there is an acknowledgement that over the course of the time that your vehicle is plugged in and is being charged that there is an allowance for variable rate changes.

It simply has to be communicated to the customer ahead of time and there has to be an indication on the receipt at the end, whether it's electronic or hardcopy, that when those rate changes did take place because it is recognized that there could be reduction or an increase in charge, depending on the case for peak or off-peak hours. Does that answer your question in terms of the general acknowledgement of that?

DAVID COMBES: It answers the question that a small subsection of this has been done. I guess my question is does NIST intend to go address the larger issue? Now a part of this goes down to the question of do you want a deregulated, not a deregulated, a decentralized versus a centralized control on charging, which is a question which I don't think has been answered yet.

But my question is, is NIST looking to provide a communication standard such that a car can travel from state, to state, to state, across the nation and be able to deal with a command controlled charging system?

TINA BUTCHER: Well as far as the standards that are in Handbook 44 the standard generally deals with the legal metrology aspect of the transaction; that is the measurement of the electrical energy and charging the customer.

As far as ongoing energy management, communication with the grid, that would probably be outside of the scope of this particular work group. That's not to say that elsewhere at NIST there may be a group. And we had, at one time, a Smart Grid Program that dealt with those kinds of questions, but I don't really feel that I'm qualified in my capacity to answer for any other programs at NIST that might take that on.

But I—it sounds, if I understand your question correctly, that that may go a little beyond the commercial transaction portion of it. And I may not understand your question fully, but I think that might be a little bit beyond what this work group has taken on.

DAVID COMBES: Okay thank you very much.

TINA BUTCHER: You're welcome.

COORDINATOR: Our next question is from Mary Tucoch. Your line is open.

MARY TUCOCH: Thank you. This is just logistical for those of us who are only on the telephone. Could you read the Web address where we could find some of the information to reference later please from the C2ES and others?

LINDA BLUESTEIN: There's—at the end of the C2ES presentation there's a list of websites for further resources. And I know you can't see them, but if there's some way we can get those to you it would be a lot easier than reading them.

MARY TUCOCH: Okay.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: So if you want to just send an email out to Sandra Loi she can get you a copy of the slide, or email it to you, or something.

MARY TUCOCH: Great thank you.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay sure.

SANDRA LOI: Yes and we'll go ahead, this is Sandra, we'll go ahead afterwards and we'll get a copy of, or a list, of all of the participants and I'll go ahead and send a follow-up email since there's some that could not see the slides and direct them to the links, as well as to where the recording and the PowerPoints will be posted.

COORDINATOR: As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question please press star, 1 on your phone at this time. One moment please.

SANDRA LOI: Thank you, Kendra. I'm going to just go ahead and throw out another question…

COORDINATOR: Our next question—I'm sorry.

SANDRA LOI: Oh go ahead, go ahead.

COORDINATOR: Sorry. Our next question is from Rhonda Walton. Your line is open.

RHONDA WALTON: Thank you. My question is a follow-up to Mary's question because I was having trouble getting in to the webinar as well to see the slides and having difficulty with the spelling of some of the sites.

And it said that it was Windows based only and so I was wondering if in fact she was, you know, a Mac user as well and if you will, in the future, be able to allow Mac or Apple products to be able to participate in the webinars?

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Sandra, is that something you can address?

SANDRA LOI: Sure. Yes, so we know that there are—tend to be issues with Macs. This is the system—we use Live Meeting regularly and we've been working with them to see if there's a fix or another way to address that. But we're definitely—we continue to look at different software for webinars, so just stay tuned and hopefully we'll be able to find something that will be compatible with Mac.

So we are aware that there tend to be issues with logging and Macs. But like I said, we'll go ahead and send the follow-up email to everyone that participated and we'll get you the information and a link to the recording and the PowerPoint. So sorry for any inconvenience for those on Macs and we continue to work to try to remedy that issue.

COORDINATOR: All right it looks like there are no other questions in the queue at this time.

SANDRA LOI: Okay…

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Do you have anything else, Sandra?

NICK NIGRO: Linda, I saw a question, sorry this is Nick, I see a question about—from Mike Moore in the Q&A here that I think we can answer.

SANDRA LOI: Yes. I was going to go ahead—yes if you want to read it, or I can, Nick?

NICK NIGRO: Sure, sure, so Mike asks, "Will EVSE's need to comply even if they do not charge a fee for charging an EV?"

And the short answer is that this has been the way that service providers have been able to put out public charging in other states where the regulatory certainty hasn't been made with regards to charging by unit of energy, or by the kilowatt hour. They charge by parking, so based on time, they offer it for free, there's lots of ways of overcoming the regulatory hurdle about—that we were talking about.

But there are some business models for some charging service providers that are dependent on the ability to sell EV charging services by the kilowatt hour. And in states where that regulatory certainty hasn't been made it kind of—it's a risk for the company to operate in the state and that decreases the likelihood that they'll make investments in those areas. I hope that answers your question.

SANDRA LOI: Thanks, Nick. So one last online question I'm seeing here from Shawna Bosk. This is for Jim, Jim Creevy mentioned describing NEMA's activities as safety at installation measure for EVSE's for capacity for the actual charging.

How does this measure enact with local authorities electrical infrastructure? And specifically does NEMA provide local authorities with recommendations on infrastructure capacity updates as well?

JIM CREEVY: So I, you know, I mentioned a number. A lot of these are industry standards and best practices. You know, I mentioned the one from the National Electrical Contractors Association, so that's one that electrical contractors would use.

The National Electric Code governs a lot of how buildings are built. So once the code is in force it is to be complied with and there are building inspectors who are—whose job is to go out there to make sure that new buildings comply with the updated code. So, yes, in terms of EVSE Ready and in terms of the capacity of the circuit, yes, it would be designed to handle whatever EVSE load would be envisioned.

SANDRA LOI: All right, Kendra, are there any other phone questions coming in?

COORDINATOR: Yes we do have one more question from Ron Hoffmer. Your line is open.

RON HOFFMER: Hello, this is—my name is Ron. I'm with Alameda County Weights and Measures and listening, so it's interesting. I had issues with connecting, so I didn't see all of the slides. But there was a question about sequencing for—I believe that is a utility type question. It probably will not fall into the realm of regulation from the National Conference and NIST regulations. That's my gut feeling because a lot of that is in your house and we don't go there. I don't know if that helps or not.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay thank you. Do we have any other online questions or…?

RON HOFFMER: The other part would be is, I believe, the California PUC is in the process of making it so that the charging stations are not going to be considered a utility item, so they can charge rates as whatever they feel is appropriate, not the utility rates.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay thank you for that clarification. Are there any other online questions or calls?

SANDRA LOI: Yes, I have one more that just came in from David Combes. Is it intended that the transaction information will be available within the vehicle or only at the charging station? Is it intended that there will be a data connection between the vehicle's operators readout screen and the charging station?

TINA BUTCHER: This is Tina. I can speak to that from the draft NIST Handbook 44 Requirements. Right now there is a requirement that the consumer has to be provided with information about the transaction. That can be provided in a hardcopy receipt onsite or it does provide the ability to provide it electronically. And it's not very specific as far as electronic, as long as it's something that's made available to the consumer.

So for example, it could be sent by email; it could be an invoice; it could be on their phones; or if there's a way that you can get the information in your vehicle, which I am not sure what that would look like, but there are several options by which that information could be provided.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Thank you, Tina. Are there any other questions?

SANDRA LOI: No one online.

COORDINATOR: There are no other questions on the phone at this time.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay I think we're about the 2:30 point and so I just wanted to thank everybody for their participation in this webinar. And I would really like to thank Tina Butcher from NIST, and Jim Creevy from NEMA, as well as Nick and Dan from C2ES, for excellent presentations. I thought they were just great.

And as we mentioned, Sandra Loi will get in touch with you with the links so that we can share them with people who couldn't get on the webinar. If you were on the webinar if you want to send Sandra, you know, some information so she can get back to you with that—with those resources that would be great. If there are additional questions that you have afterwards you can email them to Sandra as well and we can try to link you up with an expert or get you some—an answer to your question.

I really appreciate everybody hanging in there throughout the hour and a half, and we'll hopefully hear from everybody or see, or I guess not see everybody, but have you join in on our next quarterly webinar, which should be in the winter of 2015. Thank you.