Webinar on the Best of the Clean Cities Tools and Resources (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Webinar on the Best of the Clean Cities Tools and Resources presented on March 28, 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'd 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. Sandra Loi. Thank you. You may begin.

SANDRA LOI: Thank you so much. Good morning, good afternoon depending on where you all are calling-in from. Thank you for joining us today for the Clean Cities Best of the Clean Cities Tools and Resources Webinar.

Today we have Alexis Schayowitz and Sara Forni from our Clean Cities Technical Response Service, also our ICF International subcontractors. They're going to talk to you about—touch on—the top 10 tools and resources they use in their everyday work on the Clean Cities Technical Response Service.

For those who aren't familiar with Clean Cities, Clean Cities celebrated about 20 years—their 20-year anniversary—last year and the ultimate goal is to reduce petroleum consumption in the transportation sector so thank you for those who aren't as familiar, our stakeholders who are joining on today and our coordinators.

We have nearly 100 coalitions across the country that work locally to reduce petroleum consumption in the transportation sector and work with our local fleets and other stakeholders to incorporate these alternative fuels and advanced technologies into their fleets.

The Clean Cities Technical Response Service is again under the Clean Cities program and they provide additional technical assistance in addition to our other resources such as our websites and other tools that we have available. For today I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speakers so that we can go ahead and get started.

As I said we have Alexis Schayowitz and Sara Forni from ICF. Alexis and Sara are part of ICF's International Energy Environment and Transportation Group specializing in alternative fuels, advanced vehicles and other petroleum-reduction strategies in the transportation sector.

They provide technical assistance, research and program support to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy for the Clean Cities and energy policy act, state and alternative fuel provider programs.

Alexis, Sara and their team monitor and respond to inquiries via the Clean Cities Technical Response Service and maintain the alternative fuels data center station locator and laws and incentives databases.

Alexis has a degree from Hamilton College in government neuroscience and Sara holds a degree from Michigan State University in environmental studies and applications. I'll go ahead and pass it off to Alexis to begin. Thank you.

ALEXIS SCHAYOWITZ: Thank, Sandra. As Sandra said, Sara and I and our team staff the Clean Cities Technical Response Service which you'll hear Sara refer to as the TRS from here on out.

We are available to Clean Cities program staff, coordinators, stakeholders, industry consumers, a wide variety of people to answer questions about alternative fuels, advanced vehicles and petroleum-reduction strategies.

Sara's going to go into some of those frequently-asked questions today and those tools—the top 10 tools—that we use to answer them. I just wanted to emphasize that it will be a brief tour of each of these tools and there are additional resources out there to answer your questions whether they be complete webinar on the tool or users guides.

So we really encourage you to go to the website and I believe the slides will be available after the webinar and we encourage you to go to the Website so we've included and checkout those additional resources for additional information on the tool.

I also wanted to point out that ICF does maintain some of the tools that we'll talk about today and that would include the station locator and the laws and incentives database so you may hear Sara refer to we do this and we do that so that sort of explains where we're coming from with those.

But the TRS contact information that will be provided at the end is sort of your one-stop shop for any questions that you may have as Sandra said but also updates to those two databases so feel free to pass them along so I will turn it over to Sara. I will be available with Sara at the end of the presentation to help answer questions so Sara?

SARA FORNI: Thanks Alexis and thank you everyone for joining today. So as Alexis mentioned, today we're going to explore the top 10 tools and resources that we at the TRS find most helpful in responding to TRS inquiries relating to alternative fuels. So we've broken these categories down into three groups: calculators, search tools and data and statistics resources.

For each of these resources that we have listed under each category, we're going to highlight one example question based on inquiries we've received in the past so basically today our goal is just to familiarize you all with these resources so that you know where to go in the future for answers.

Most of the resources that we're going to talk about today can be found on this tools page of the alternative fuels data center website and I highly suggest that you save this page as a bookmark for easy access. It's a great tool for just a one-stop shop.

For the resources that aren't listed on this tools page, you can find most of them on the AFDC header here which is the green bar shown at the top of the page with some exceptions. Tools on the AFDC header include the maps and data, case studies, station locator and also the laws and incentives database here.

So the first category we're going to talk about today is calculators and each of these calculators is listed on that main AFDC tools page that I just went over so they're really easy to find. so let's first start off with a question that a consumer might ask while deciding which vehicle model to purchase.

Is there a basic tool I can use to compare the cost of ownership and emissions for a light-duty alternative fuels vehicle versus a light-duty conventional vehicle, specifically the model year 2012 Ford Focus and the model year 2013 Honda Civic compressed natural gas vehicle?

So the best way to help with this sort of question is the AFDC vehicle cost calculator and it allows you to compare the cost of ownership and emissions for most vehicle models. You will also note that this tool's available on your mobile device and as a widget which can be embedded on other Websites.

And the first step in using this tool is to choose your vehicle so you can either create your own custom vehicle by entering a vehicle name, purchase price, fuel type and fuel economy under that create your own vehicle section that's highlighted in red or you can also just select your vehicles from the dropdown menu here.

So you put your model year, the manufacturer and the specific model that you're looking for and it goes specific including whether it's a four-wheel-drive vehicle or anything like that.

You can also fill-in your own specific information about purchase price that you got from a dealership or you can also just use the default information and the same goes for the fuel prices there at the bottom.

If you know the fuel price at your local gas station, you could enter that in there or you can just use the default again. The next step is how in the calculator how you actually drive your car so how often do you drive?

How far do you drive? What percent of your driving is highway and you can also add-in data on extra trips you take besides this normal driving and that would include things like vacations say you know exactly where you're going from Point A to Point B and how many miles that is. Then you can just include all that mileage here in the other trip section.

And also if one of your vehicles that you're choosing is capable of using alternative fuel some of the time so like a flexible-fuel vehicle can use ethanol, this section's going to ask you to enter in the percent driving time that you plan to use that alternative fuel so the tool can be pretty accurate.

Once you select get results on the main tool page, you're going to be able to see your estimated annual operating cost and your annual emissions and this tool's really nice because it allows you to produce a graph of all this data and you can see that here in action on the left showing the cumulative cost of ownership by year.

So specifically this graph shows you that the purchase price of the Honda Civic CNG is higher than that of the Ford Focus and assuming that there's a five-year payment period—that's the assumptions of the tool—you're going to still be paying-off the vehicle until the five-year mark but then after those five years, you're done paying-off the vehicle and the annual operating cost is actually cheaper for the Honda Civic CNG.

We're also going to talk later about how to identify incentives and so these costs can actually be offset more with those incentives. Something to also note is that the tool allows you to see emissions differences between the two vehicles and the Honda Civic CNG actually emits about 14% less CO2 annually than the Ford Focus does.

Moving on to the next tool, say we received a question like this into the TRS. Our fleet would like to reduce our petroleum consumption by 60,000 gasoline gallon equivalents annually. Is there a tool that allows us to try out various scenarios to create a comprehensive plan of attack?

So for this question we're going to use the AFDC petroleum-reduction planning tool or also known as the PREP tool which allows you to determine the fuel savings and emissions reductions that can be realized by changing the way your fleet drives or which vehicles you're driving.

And the main function of the calculator is for a fleet to enter in a specific petroleum-reduction goal and that's annual and then try out different savings methods in order to reach that goal.

Now when using the tool you obviously don't need to enter in every single savings method but just to help show the contributions of each towards the final goals, we've gone ahead with the storyline that the local fleet in question is a municipal vehicle fleet with tons of different types of conventional and alternative-fueled vehicles in the mix.

And based on the plan that we laid out on the last slide, we want to reach a 60,000 gasoline gallon equivalent reduction this year and that's actually shown on the right graph, the black dot on the annual production—sorry, annual petroleum-reduction tool—graph there shows your goal that you laid-out at the very beginning.

So with the saving groups I've picked out here, you can see on the bottom total savings plan per year bars that with these methods the fleet is going to make it halfway or a little bit over halfway to its petroleum-reduction goal and so in order for the fleet to actually meet that goal that they laid-out at the very beginning, they're going to have to ramp-up one of these efforts.

And you can also see that the plan reduces CO2 emissions by 359 tons per year and another added bonus is that the PREP tool will show you how much you're going to save with these methods so you can also see that on the bottom total savings from plan per year bar.

If you just scroll to the right, it's under fuel cost savings so you'll be saving the $15,440 per year with this plan. Next tool, say I'm trying to calculate the emissions and payback for a heavy-duty diesel refuse truck versus its liquefied natural gas counterpart. Is there a tool available that can calculate this for multiple vehicles?

So for this question we're going to head directly on over to Argonne National Laboratories AFLEET tool which stands for the alternative fuel life-cycle environmental and economic transportation tool so AFLEET's a little bit easier to say and it looks at the environmental and economic costs and benefits of alternative-fueled vehicles versus their conventional vehicle counterparts and it is a spreadsheet-based tool.

In this calculator you can estimate things like petroleum use, GHG emissions, other air pollutants and also the cost of owning the vehicles. During this specific webinar, I'm just going to concentrate on three tabs of the AFLEET tool to help us answer this question and those are indicated with the red arrows there.

We're going to talk about the inputs tab, payback outputs and the total cost of ownership outputs tabs. When you first use the tool, I think it's probably best to read through the instructions tab shown here just so you can get your bearings and this tool walks you through the succeeding tabs and it outlines all of the basic information you need to actually run the tool.

So first as it points out in the instructions tab, you are going to first update the inputs tab here shown at the right and specifically you're going to want to update your state, your vehicle types, the number of vehicles and also the fuel economy cells.

So note that any cell that's colored yellow can be updated with the user's actual own vehicle data but if you don't have that, you can just use the defaults that are already in there. So one of those things that you can fill in is the purchase price of the vehicles so if you know how expensive your vehicle is, you can put that in there.

And then also to answer the question that I put on the last slide, we're going to here update the inputs tab and select Colorado as the location, refuse truck as the vehicle type under the heavy-duty vehicle information section and we're also going to put in 30 vehicles under both the diesel and the LNG options so that we can compare the alternative-fuel vehicles to the conventional counterparts.

After you put your specific data into the input tab, you can see the payback in the payback outputs tab and this tab shows your results here so your simple payback based on a number of things including you vehicle purchase price, your annual operating savings and your life-cycle emissions and you can find both the two tables to the right and the graph to the left on this tab.

So basically these charts point out that the purchase price of 30 LNG refuse trucks is higher than diesel but you're going to start to see a return on your investment starting at 2.9 years.

And that's because if you go to the table at the top, you can see that if you were driving an LNG refuse truck, you're going to no longer have costs in there like the diesel exhaust fluid costs and also fuel prices are cheaper with LNG. So you can also see in the bottom table that the LNG refuse trucks will use less petroleum and emit less GHGs than diesel.

This chart on the left can be found on the TCO outputs tab which is the total cost of ownership and again this data just shows that after 2.9 years the LNG refuse truck becomes cheaper to own and operate than the diesel version but the TCO outputs tab also provides you with the lifetime cost of ownership for 30 refuse trucks by fuel type as well as the lifetime emissions from each fleet.

And you can see from the table on the bottom that the LNG refuse trucks will be cheaper over the lifetime of the vehicles and the tool uses the default of 28 years or ownership but you can also change that data if you know how long you're going to be driving your vehicle for.

And the tables at the top here just show the acquisition costs for all 30 vehicles both for the diesel and the LNG fleets and that's on the total cost of ownership tab.

So the next big category of resources are the data search tools which are all available through the AFDC tools page and the AFDC tools page even has a link to fueleconomy.gov, their find-a-car search.

The AFDC station locator can help to answer all kinds of questions on where fueling stations are located and how many fueling stations are currently in operation in the U.S. and so that main number there that you see on the first page, that only includes the public stations that are currently available and so it's going to exclude private, planned and temporarily unavailable stations.

So it also represents electric vehicle supply equipment locations rather than the actual number of ports. That's important to remember . So the common questions we get on stations include things like how many fueling stations by fuel type are there in the U.S.?

How close is the nearest E85 fueling station to my fleet facility and are there any private CNG fueling stations that would allow my fleet to fuel in case of emergencies? We also get things like are there any planned biodiesel fueling stations near my home?

When you're using the search box under find stations, it's also handy to use the more search options tool on the right to narrow your search—or sorry, that's below—once you've selected your location and fuel type, you might want to narrow those results to a certain distance from that location.

So if you see the box at the bottom under more search options, you can select that and limit the results to say two miles or five miles or ten miles, anything you want and you can also include planned or private stations and if you want to search for private stations that your fleet may be able to fuel at, you can do that there.

You can also search under the plan-a-route tab next to find station in the green there and if you're traveling along a certain route this is handy so you can make sure that there are stations that you can fill up along the way.

You'll also want to make sure to use the more search options box for this so you aren't just searching for stations along a tiny little corridor and this tool will allow you to expand your search radius.

So here we've selected a specific CNG station so you can see what kind of data is available on each of the individual station pages. To get to this point, you can just select more details on that main search page and then for every station we include information like location, accessibility and payment.

But then we also include fuel-specific information so for example for CNG station we include information like fill type, compression and also at the bottom circled there we have vehicle accessibility which just means if there's enough space to fuel a certain type of vehicle there so can this station fill a medium-duty truck, things like that.

Another question we commonly get into the TRS inbox goes something like, what incentives are available to help purchase a model year 2014 Nissan Leaf all-electric vehicles in California. So to answer this question, the best place to look is the AFDC laws and incentives database and this is available on that green AFDC header at the top of the page.

Since both individuals and businesses can claim state and federal incentives, I would suggest using the advanced search to answer this question but you can also just search the red state button and select California to find incentives that are available in that state.

It's also important to note that the AFDC laws and incentives database doesn't track all local incentives so even though on that main page it says find local laws and incentives, that's just a selection of what's out there.

So to get back to the question, you can see here in the advanced search option that I've selected federal and California for our jurisdiction. I've also selected electric vehicles as our technology type because you can see the question above was for an all-electric vehicle in California.

So for the incentive type I'm going to select tax incentives, other incentives and rebates and I chose not to select grants as this is just a search for an individual and then I also selected as the user vehicle owner or driver.

So let's check out these results. While a search did return more incentives than are actually on this slide here, we narrowed down the results so you can just see a sample of those incentives that showed up.

And there are definitely many more incentives out there including more rebates, insurance discounts, HOV lane exemptions, any kinds of things that can help assist vehicle owners after the initial purchase.

And California is a little bit different than other states in that it's divided into air districts that have primary responsibility for controlling air pollution in their area so they can also offer incentives within the state.

So these results shown here on the page, the first result is a state incentive offered for the clean vehicle rebate project and below that we've shown an example of an incentive offered by an air pollution control district and then below that we have our federal incentive.

Next question, I'm looking into procuring additional vehicles for my fleet both light and heavy-duty. Is there a way to look at all available vehicles within certain parameters? The best tools to use here are the light and heavy-duty vehicle and engine search options and these can both be accessed on that main AFDC tools page as separate links.

They do search somewhat differently in that for the light duty you can search by fuel type, manufacturer, class and model year but for the heavy-duty search you can search vehicles, engines and hybrid propulsion systems and also by subcategories under those like manufacturer, fuel type and application if you're searching under heavy-duty vehicles.

The next question we have is, is there a resource available that will easily allow me to compare the fuel economy and purchasing price of the model year 2014 Ford Focus electric to the model year 2014 Volkswagen Jetta hybrid?

Fueleconomy.gov is a great resource to use when you're looking to compare the fuel economy of different vehicles so you can either select your specific vehicle through the find-a-car dropdown there or you can also select compare side-by-side and that's also under the find-a-car dropdown if you already know which vehicles you want to compare to each other.

And also as I mentioned before you can get to this fueleconomy.gov page through that AFDC tools page that I first introduced.

So let's look at the compare side-by-side function first and here I selected two vehicles, one hybrid electric vehicle and one all-electric vehicle.

And the nice thing about fueleconomy.gov is that you can compare these two vehicles specifically ones that aren't the same fuel type including electric vehicles and conventional vehicles or an electric vehicle and a hybrid electric vehicle and fueleconomy.gov does the gasoline gallon equivalent conversion for you so you can easily see which vehicle is the best option for you.

This fuel economy tab within a vehicle record will also allow you to view things like the annual fuel cost, the cost and fuel to drive 25 miles and then sometimes even the tank size.

While the environment tab here—the energy and environment tab—is going to allow you to see the energy impact score assigned to the vehicle by EPA as well as the vehicle's greenhouse gas emissions score.

Other great resources you can find on fueleconomy.gov that we often refer TRS clients to is things like how your vehicles are tested for fuel economy by both the manufacturer and by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency so you'll find that under the About EPA Ratings dropdown.

You can also find information here on how your mileage is going to vary from that estimate and how people aren't going to get that concrete EPA estimated fuel economy that's listed on the page.

So say you're looking for input from other fleet managers.

A local school system in the area is interested in speaking with fleet managers or maintenance managers of large fleets that use propane school buses. How can I find fleets to contact?

So to answer this question, your best search tool is going to be the AFDC case study search and it's going to allow you to search quickly and easily for success stories about alternative transportation technologies and alternative fuels.

So here to answer this question we're going to select propane and school transportation which I've selected here in red and the search returns both stories that are web stories and videos and the videos are usually Motor Week videos depending on your selections.

These case studies are also going to include sometimes the names and contact information for Clean Cities coordinators that helped out with the project and it also sometimes includes contact information for fleet managers that you can contact to learn about their projects.

The final category of resources that we're going to go over today are the data and statistics resources. So the first tool we're going to explore here answers this question, Are there any resources that can tell me how many CNG vehicles were estimated to be on the road each year from 2005 to 2010?

So the AFDC maps and data search page is the best tool to use when searching for a graph on alternative fuels and vehicles and to search for this graph you can use either the browse by category dropdown menu or you can also search by keyword and those two search options are circled here.

Specifically categories you can search by under the browse by category include vehicles, fuels and infrastructure, laws and incentives, regulated fleets and Clean Cities and there's also options within those to be specific to your question.

So for this particular question, we can search for alternative-fuel vehicles and you can use that in the search bar or you can also select alternative-fuel vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles under the vehicles category section.

So regardless of whether you search by the browse by category or the keyword search, the alternative-fuel vehicles and use graph that I show here on the bottom of the page shows up in the results pretty close to the top every time and this chart can be a little confusing with every alternative fuel being graphed here.

So the best option is just to deselect the unwanted fuel types and you can do that by just clicking on the name of the fuel types that you don't want on the right here and in this case we want CNG so we selected everything except CNG to leave that open. You can also download this data in Excel format in the upper right-hand corner that says download.

So say you're comparing the number of AFVs in your state government fleet which is Arizona with the total number of AFVs in all state fleets. Is there a way to easily view this data in graph format for 2011?

The U.S. Energy and Information Administration has some great resources with regard to alternative-fuel use and it also includes information on alternative-fuel production and also plant capacity.

So to find information on regulated fleets which include state and alternative-fuel provider fleets, federal agencies, transit agencies and other private and municipal government fleets, you can just select the link on this page that's marked as estimated number of vehicles in use and fuel consumed and that includes information back to 2003.

You can find that information by either fuel type or vehicle type there but they both take you to the same page so it doesn't really matter which one you click on. It's also important to note that some of the AFDC maps and data information is pulled from the EIA but if you visit EIA directly, you can find information at a more granular level.

So this data search tool includes information on not only vehicles in regulated fleets but also on fuel consumption so you can use the dropdown menus to find data by year, fuel type, state, weight class, vehicle type, engine configuration and user group.

So to answer the question proposed on the last slide, you would select the Year 2011. You want all fuel types because you just want to see want to see all vehicles that are within that state fleet and first let's say we're going to search for Arizona because that's the state fleet you're looking for.

You're going to click submit and then a graph shows up which can be shown—you can see that on the upper right—and it shows that the Arizona state agency fleet consists of 2283 alternative-fuel vehicles.

So if we want to compare that number to all vehicles that are in all state fleets, you would just go back into your search tool, select all states, submit again and then you can see that in all U.S. state agency fleets, there are 111,223 alternative-fuel vehicles.

Also you can see on the left I have selected a user and fuel data tab but you can also select the supplier data tab and that provides information on vehicles made available each year and also if you're looking for projections related to vehicles and fuel use, we suggest using the EIA annual energy outlook and you can find that on the EIA Website.

So we've also includes some bonus resources here for you all. Other websites that the TRS often uses to reply to inquiries are government agency websites so for example we often refer TRS clients to EPA websites for information specifically on alternative-fuel vehicle conversions and also the Renewable Fuel Standard.

Again these are just some examples so these are great resources that we use and we also often use information from national labs like Argonne National Lab and Idaho National Laboratory, NREL and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help answer our inquiries.

The TRS also uses industry association websites when appropriate when responding to TRS clients. Again these are just examples and there are a ton of other great resources out there but we do rely on these resources for data that we don't have available through the AFDC or other government websites.

So here I've just listed some resources that are available for specific fuel types, specifically the National Biodiesel Board, there's a resource in here for engine manufacturers' positions of support for biodiesel blends, NGV America's business directory, PERC's case studies webpage.

We also have RFA summary of automobile manufacturer fuel recommendations for E15 and then also the Electric Drive Transportation Association's sales dashboard.

Another great resource is just to go to your Clean Cities coordinator so to find your Clean Cities coordinator nearest you, you can use this website and you can sort by state here on the left or if you know your coordinator's first or last name you can also sort by that.

And these coordinators are also great resources for your fellow coordinators so if a coordinator has any questions for others, you can just send that out through the list-serve and that's a pretty great resource. Each coordinator listing also includes a link to the coalition website and provides contact information.

And this is just a summary of the main resources we talked about today. If you have any questions, we'll take them now.

COORDINATOR: To ask a question, please press star 1 and record your first and last name. There are no questions queued at this time.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, thank you. Well thank you Sara and Alexis so much for this information and we will post the PowerPoint slides up on the Clean Cities webinar archive pages as well as the recording.

Let's give it another few minutes, if anyone has any questions go ahead and dial-in. It's star 1 to ask a question and we'll just give it a couple of minutes just to see if anyone has anything come to mind and Alexis and Sara if you had anything else you wanted to add at this point, feel free to jump in.

COORDINATOR: There is a question in the queue. The first one is from Dana Boudreaux. You may need to star 6 your line Dana. It is open. You can ask your question.

DANA BOUDREAUX: Yes, hello. You've already answered my question.

ALEXIS SCHAYOWITZ: Okay, okay.

SANDRA LOI: Wonderful.

COORDINATOR: Thank you. The next question in the queue is from Danielle Green. Your line is open. You may ask your question.

DANIELLE GREEN: Hi. I wanted to know if there's any information about fuel cell energy on the website?

SARA FORNI: There definitely is information on the AFDC about that. If you just go to hydrogen under the fuel type, you can find information about that there.

DANIELLE GREEN: Okay. Thank you.

COORDINATOR: There are no other questions in the queue at this time.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, great. Alexis, was there anything you wanted to add or…

ALEXIS SCHAYOWITZ: No, I think we're good, just a reminder to folks that our e-mail address and phone number are there and if anything comes up when you're looking at the slides later or anything, feel free to reach out.

SANDRA LOI: Yes, certainly, you can reach out to the Technical Response Service. You can reach out to myself Sandra and yes, don't ever hesitate to contact us or you can go directly to your Clean Cities coordinator as Sara mentioned toward the end of her presentation. Depending on where you are, you will likely have someone in your neighborhood so don't hesitate to reach out to them as well.

They're also very familiar with these resources and can kind of walk you through it and talk you through them as well in addition to our Technical Response Service. Any other questions before we go ahead and sign-off for today?

COORDINATOR: There are no more questions in the queue at this time.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, all right, well wonderful. Well thank you to everyone, thank you to our speakers and thank you to everyone for participating today. Again if you have any questions do not hesitate to reach out. We will be posting as I mentioned the PowerPoint slides and the recording and I'm happy to send an e-mail out to all of today's participants letting you know once the PowerPoint is posted and available on the Web. Have a great weekend and we will talk soon. Thank you.

COORDINATOR: Thank you. This concludes today's conference. Participants you may disconnect at this time.