Electric Vehicle Winter 2014 Quarterly Discussion Webinar (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Electric Vehicle Winter 2014 Quarterly Discussion Webinar presented on March 12, 2014.

COORDINATOR: Welcome and thank you for standing by. All participants will be in a listen-only mode for the duration of today's call. During the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one and record your first and last name. To withdraw your question, please press star two. This call is being recorded. If you would like—I'm sorry—if you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. And your host for today's call is Ms. Linda Bluestein. Thank you, and you may begin.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Thanks very much. This is Linda Bluestein. I'm the co-director of the Department of Energy's Clean Cities Program and we're here today to talk about the content of a report that will help people make sense of an enormous body of work developed under our 2011 Clean Cities Plug-In Electric Vehicle Community Readiness Awards.

Now the genesis of these awards and the idea sprung forth in 2010 when we had the first push for OEM produced electric vehicles. And communities to some degree were and were not ready for the transition and to make the transition smooth for citizens.

We heard from around the country that as some of the programs and projects that had started years before were faltering due to staff cut backs because at the time the economy wasn't very good and it was coming at a very bad point to have this type of stagnation when the OEM vehicles were arriving. And the communities were really interested in plug-in electric vehicles because whether it's attracting economic development and new business to your community or a certain type of consumer or citizen or employee and reducing emissions of course for tailpipe and greenhouse gas emissions—all of those have attractive benefits for communities across the country.

So one thing our reaction was to get some funding out to communities across the country and we were successful in awarding grants to 16 partnerships across the country that collaborated out everything from streamlining permitting processes, updating old codes, establishing enforcement mechanisms for plug in electric vehicle parking, a regional planning to plan future public infrastructure, recharging site design, things like America Disabilities Act, compliance for PEV parking, grid impacts and consumer education and market research.

And they tackled—also tackled, multiunit dwelling issues in a number of areas that needed further development. So these are very good starts and created a lot of models and actually thousands upon thousands of pages of information and templates and new model codes and things very useful to communities. But the problem was they were not in bite sized chunks because all of this was submitted—if you go to our website—by each community and literally you'd have to sift through thousands of pages maybe to get what you want.

So our solution was to work with C2ES and I'll talk to you a little bit about them in just a minute and Matt Frades to put together a way—a guide to be able to help people make sense out of the huge amount of materials and to really help them pinpoint and find what they needed and also to give highlight to some of the unique aspects of each report because of each planning report and each document from these PEV readiness grants.

They could be used by other communities and so we would really like to transfer that knowledge and I think this report really puts us in a good place to do that.

So today we're going to hear from Matt Frades from C2ES and he's going to talk in some depth about the unique information that can be pulled from these community deliverable reports and how to effectively use the guide that he and his company developed. And then I'd just like to give you a short introduction of Matt and his company and then Matt will get started. He's our only speaker today.

Matt is a transportation fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and he works on strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and oil consumption in the transportation sector. He's got a focus on public and private sector action to advance alternative fuel and advanced technology vehicles.

And prior to joining C2ES he worked as a senior associate at the advisory firm where he consulted on the economics and politics of energy and transportation issues. He's also worked as a research scientist at Carbon Solutions New England where he served as a technical advisor. And he holds a master of public affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as well as an MS in hydrology and a BS in geology from the University of New Hampshire.

But before we get started I do want to mention that on page three I kind of covered the awards and if you—on page three of his slides, there's a map of where all those awards were and some of them were regional in nature and some of them just pinpointed a very specific area. A number of them crossed the boundary of many states to provide templates and information for people across big swaths of a region like the Northeast and New England states that included New York and some of the other Northeastern states. And then California was one but it's so big and obviously it's a huge population and included five cities in its planning and also templates for the entire state.

So anyway with that Matt I guess you can get started. I do want to mention that C2ES came to us through their—through a group that they were holding to advance the cause of electric vehicles early on and it was a dialogue group on plug-in electric vehicles and they're an independent nonpartisan nonprofit organization and they work on issues regarding climate change and they used to be related to the PEW center on global climate change but they became C2ES in 2011. Anyway thanks Matt and looking forward to your presentation.

MATT FRADES: Great, thanks Linda. I'll just go quickly through this slide three again and just to reiterate, there was 16 of these projects. They took place at a whole bunch of different scales down from a city level which is the case with New York City as an example all the way up to multistate in New England as one example and then the southeast region as well and the state level.

And so each of these readiness plans is very different and they're different because they address a different area. These different areas have different geography, demographics of folks, different infrastructure available especially existing stations—refueling stations for electric vehicles. The politics are different. These different communities have differing levels of familiarity with electric vehicles and so each one of these 16 readiness plans was really custom made for that community but at the same time there are a lot of lessons that other communities can learn from them even though they're all quite customized for their region.

And so the purpose of the report that we're going to discuss today that we wrote for Clean Cities—this guide—is to synthesize the lessons learned from all these 16 different reports and the thousands of pages of outputs that were generated as Linda mentioned to highlight some of the really interesting grantee activities and outcomes that were reached and to help the readers which is you all and folks who you share this with to connect with the information that's valuable to you.

This report is—the guide- is written to be accessible to really anyone and so if you're a policy maker who's getting into the details or, you know, you're even just part of the general public in a community or you're an employee of a workplace and you want to try to get your employer interested in offering charging. This report is written to be accessible to anyone.

So I'm going to go over how the report is organized because I think that will give you a sense of what you can expect in it and how to use the report. The first thing we present in the report is an executive summary that just says here's what the grants were, here's what they were about, a little bit of what the background that Linda was talking about and then an overview of what the high level findings were and some really good examples of activities that the grantees conducted.

The bulk of the report is a set of in depth sections that are arranged topically so they're on topics like what are the benefits of using electric vehicles. What are the issues around workplace charging? What are the incentives around electric vehicles and there were several of these topical sessions. And each one of these topical sessions again goes into more detail about what the grantees found and also more detail in terms of what the grantees did.

And then at the end of each one of these topical sections there's a table like the one we show on the right here which says if you'd like to know more you can turn to the thousands of pages of even more detailed information that can be found in the reports generated by the grantees—the 16 grantees under the program right down to the report title and the page number and just what it is that you might be able to find.

And so it's something that you might find a list like this might be, you know, if you're really interested in understanding what master plan language for local ordinances model language, that would be an example. Turn right to that information and get access to it quickly. So that's the goal of this report.

And what we're going to talk about today over the next 30 minutes if I can speak quickly is some—give a sampling of the types of things that you'll find in the report and the grantee materials. And so we're going to kind of give the 10,000 foot view and do a couple little deep dives to give an example—give a texture of the information that you can find.

And so this is sort of the map to what we're going to talk about today. We're going to cover the benefits of EVs—electric vehicles—we're going to cover incentives. We're going to go a little bit deeper into charging stations which are needed, infrastructure. We're going to go into the role of local governments and utilities, outreach programs and then developing regional and local partnerships which is really a core activity of all the grantees. So here we go.

So as the grantees recognize electric vehicles have a number of benefits including they can reduce emissions both of greenhouse gases and criteria pollutants. They can allow the transportation sector to make greater use of renewable energy rather than just oil derived energy because they—electricity is generated from a number of domestic energy sources, they can bolster our energy security.

Contrary to the sticker price, the upfront increase price in electric vehicles today, electric vehicles are actually more affordable to fuel and to maintain and so they hold the promise of being a more affordable form of transportation for some users and lastly due to the fuel savings there may be some in fact some local economic benefits and development resulting from adoption of electric vehicles in your community.

So to highlight a couple of examples of what the grantees did in these areas to understand the benefits of electric vehicles. Here's—Colorado did a emissions analysis from well to wheels which means the total lifecycle of electric vehicles and compared that to conventional vehicles. This study was the first of its kind in its state. It does take into account the emissions from electricity generation and they found that emissions from electric vehicles were consistently lower than conventional vehicles. And so on the right you can see that this applies to greenhouse gases, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide and NOx and SOx as well.

Electric vehicles also as we mentioned just a moment ago have local economic benefits potentially. So the Ohio grantee looked into this and did some economic modeling. They started out noting from some economic modeling that out of every dollar spent on gasoline only 16.4 cents of that dollar stay in the local economy because the gasoline's not produced there so saving money on gasoline increases the amount of money that consumer have available to spend on goods that result in more economic multipliers or more spending locally.

And so their analysis showed that for every electric vehicle that's adopted in the state, they estimate that approximately $1300 of net economic benefits are realized due to greater spending locally.

And lastly for highlighting this, California grantee looked at this opportunity to make greater use of renewable energy. They noted that of the electric vehicle owners that they surveyed almost 40% also invested in residential rooftop solar. And so the advantage of this is the distributed power aspect and the opportunity to couple the efficient electric vehicle with power that is even lower emitting than the grid—in fact zero emitting as distributed solar energy and in some cases in your state this energy may be even less expensive than grid energy.

And they had an idea that in addition to the distributed component of incorporating renewable utilities, electric utilities could also think about offering renewable energy offerings where customers can elect to pay a little bit more to support renewable energy as part of the PEV or electric vehicle rates that they offer to their consumers. And so we'll talk a little bit more about those rates later.

So because of these recognized benefits of electric vehicles there are a number of national and some state and local incentives that are designed to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and overcome some of the barriers that they face and being sort of a new technology and competing against incumbent internal combustion engine technology.

And these incentives come open very important financial incentives on both the vehicles and the charging infrastructure themselves and also nonfinancial incentives like HOV lane access or priority parking or other types of incentives that make it more attractive to own one of these vehicles.

There are other incentives as well including incentives for making buildings and facilities ready for installing charging and that could be points on a LEED certification for instance and then there was those rates we were talking about from utilities. You can offer electric vehicle owners different rates depending on whether they own an electric vehicle and or whether they're charging that vehicle at different times of the day, particularly at night when electricity is cheaper and in lower demand. Those incentive programs can be set up and they are also incentives to help introduce electric vehicles into fleets and into the heavy duty markets.

An example of one of the grantee activities in this area was the North Carolina grantee put together a list—sort of an inventory of all the incentives throughout the country they were able to find and sort of scored those based on how effective they thought they would be in their state, how feasible and how much of a priority it should be from their perspective from policy makers in their state.

So now we're going to take a little bit of a deeper dive into the need for charging stations. I'm sure you're aware that it's easy to fill up a gasoline vehicle if you own one or diesel vehicle. That's benefited from 100 years of infrastructure development for that technology. We're just now getting started on setting up infrastructure to enable this new technology of electric vehicles.

And there are a number of issues that folks, you know, whether it's states and localities offering public chargers for to meet their policy goals or whether it's a private sector investor hoping to make a profit by selling electricity, all of these actors face a number of these considerations that we're going to go through.

The first of these is power level and this is the very important one. Charging stations can be designed to deliver power at different rates all the way from level one which is like delivering power at a rate similar to a toaster that can take longer to charge a battery all the way up to a DC fast charger which is often used in some of these public stations that can charge a vehicle much more quickly but needs to deliver power at the speed of something between five and ten central air conditioning systems. And so that's a much higher power demand and delivery.

And the tradeoff that installers need to consider is I suppose you would always want to have the fastest charging speed you could because that makes it more convenient for the driver but the tradeoffs include both higher upfront costs of installation and the equipment and also higher operational costs especially associated with demand charges which we'll go into a little bit later in this presentation.

And so the power level of a station that you need as you consider this tradeoff really depends on the types of vehicles—in part depends on the types of vehicles that are going to be powering up at these stations. A plug in hybrid electric vehicle with a smaller battery and with essentially with a gasoline—ability to power itself by gasoline as a backup or supplement. That may need fewer and lower power charging stations. Maybe you only need, you know, level one or level two for those in some circumstances whereas an all-electric vehicle that only has a battery and a much larger battery is going to need a higher power station to charge that battery in a reasonable timeframe and also because those vehicles don't have a backup power system of gasoline.

So that power level is one of the considerations and design and installation of these stations that investors need to be thinking about. In order to sort of make sense of this whole process of first, you know, deciding whether you're going to put a station in and then all of the steps until that station is actually available for drivers to use—it's a long process with a lot of actors and it's not so familiar with many folks who want to do this.

And so the Texas River City's grantee put together this checklist and flowchart that can help folks in a number of different situations to navigate this process of installing EVSE it says which is electric vehicle service equipment. I so rarely use that now but it's a charging station.

So on the left you'll see the different colors. It just shows what you need to do as a vehicle owner, as a utility, as a contractor, as a permiter inspector and that's all the roles of people who need to be involved. You can follow the flowchart and it's cross-referenced with the report and a little bit more information and it helps to just make sense of this whole process.

Another design and installation consideration that's important that's really on the minds of installers right now is this issue of electrical panel capacity and how close those panels are to where you might otherwise consider it would be an optimal place to put a parking spot and a charging station to go with it.

So these in most facilities, you know, these panels already exist and the power level that you'd like to install may be limited by the remaining capacity on existing electrical panels. You can always put in a new panel but that's going to add cost to the project. And we'll talk about this a little bit in some subsequent slides but it's already a little bit of challenging financial prospect and so loading additional costs is not really a great thing to do in terms of the financial performance of a project to put a charger in.

So similarly if you look at say a parking lot and particularly spaces in the parking lot where you might want to offer a charging station there's also an issue how close the panels with available capacity are to those spaces. Again with the facilities that already exist you're sort of limited by the situation that you have and in many cases you're loading on a ton more cost by the fact that you may have to trench through pavement and overburden materials just to lay the conduit to put the wiring in and that's loading on a lot more cost. The project would look a lot less financially viable and that's tough.

That's one of the reasons why for new facilities in construction folks are talking about prewiring or preconduiting to reduce that issue. It's a somewhat much more minor investment than putting in the station if you do it when you're doing new construction activity. And so that's sort of a forward thinking solution to get around some of these limitations.

Another on panel capacity would be trying to put in panels that have more remaining capacity to allow for charging stations to be added down the road but that's a little bit more expensive and again all of these are considerations for facilities planners.

And lastly a really important design consideration is compliance with ADA. And so a few of the grantees made this a focus of their efforts. Richmond and Ohio collaborated to produce a report that shows guidelines and how to design a parking space with charging station access that's ADA compliant. The northeast regional grantee provided some helpful illustrations that show again the ADA compliant design.

So lastly on the charging stations it can be a financially challenging prospect to install a charging station and that's primarily because early on there aren't too many electric vehicles—in most markets there aren't too many electric vehicles so we're going to use the station, you know, in the first couple years or months. And so those low early utilization rates make it harder to pay back these projects quickly.

Another factor that makes it a little hard is selling electricity through this model isn't a particularly high margin business and so your revenues are also a little bit low as well.

And then on the cost side as we teased a little bit before, there's this issue of demand charges we're going to be teasing again here. We're going to go into that in a subsequent slide. But and lastly there's this issue of who's going to provide these stations and who is legally allowed to in a market for electricity that's traditionally been and remains regulated. And so this is a topic of much discussion today as states explore the roles of utilities and third party new businesses that are seeking to offer charging services.

So as an example one of the grantees—the Texas River City's grantee put together this financial modeling that have spreadsheets that you can put in a number of parameters what you expect to charge and under what circumstances and what's the cost of electricity and your demand charges and installation costs and all of those factors and you can evaluate your investment and net present value analysis as it's shown on the right.

So can folks see my cursor when I move it around? I'm not sure. I bet you cannot and maybe I'm the only one who can talk right now. but what you see as you follow the line on the image on the right is this present value line and in this, you know, case and you can make your own case—this is a portfolio of charging stations and you see that it doesn't pay back—it pays back between years 10 and 15 after the project begins in this scenario and you can see from the bars that is because they get used more in the future and the cash flow from the revenues under this scenario increase more in the future.

Really the value of this tool is that folks can get into this spreadsheet whether it's again a public sector entity that wants to understand the financial viability of a charging station that they want to offer for public policy goals or whether it's a private sector company seeking profit. These tools can help them to rationally evaluate these potential investments.

And so finally we're getting to his demand charge issue which is on the cost side. Oregon looked into this—the Oregon grantee—and they were noting how if you have some of these higher power fast charger—some of these DC fast chargers in particular—or if you have sites maybe where you have a lot of level two charging—that sort of medium power level charging at once and especially during the day this can add to the challenge of constructing a profitable business case.

And the demand charge—this is a reminder for folks who don't know—is assessed by a utility based on the highest sort of instantaneous level of power demand that you have at any given time during a period of let's say a month. So if you at some given moment are drawing a lot of power like for instance on the level of ten central air conditioners when you used to be drawing on the power of one central air conditioner and you're assessed the demand charge, now a new demand charge like on the order of ten central air conditioners. That can be a considerable expense that comes from adding these high powered chargers.

And so California—the California grantee looked into some ways to mitigate these costs. One of them might be to consider, you know, this might be a reason to install slightly lower powered chargers where electric vehicles are parked for longer periods and they don't need that high powered charging or another option is if you're really concerned about the cost you can limit the charging or change the terms of the payment structure for different times of day to try to make folks to move the charging away from periods when demand charges are much higher.

And lastly there's this question of where you—where should one locate a charging station. Again this could be aimed at folks who are looking to install a station for profit. It could also be aimed to address the public policy goals of states and localities. And so the stations themselves are needed in a variety of settings.

The primary charging location is at the home and residential but also the workplace is recognized as a very important supplementary charging location both to allow folks who don't have access to charging at home to charge vehicles and to allow people to top off during the day where vehicles are parked for many hours during the day in order to increase the number of electric miles they travel and also maybe even that could make an electric vehicle viable for a buyer when it otherwise wouldn't be.

And in addition to that you want to have these publicly available charging stations in the local communities for folks running errands and they may have some range anxiety about whether their battery's going to run out if they're in an all-electric vehicle. So you need to think about the power level for each one of those and where they might be located.

You also want to think about public charging stations for longer trips along major transportation corridors and we'll talk a little bit about that too and then site design installation will vary for each of those locations as well.

So one way to crack this nut and think about where you want to have electric vehicle charging stations is to think about where consumers are likely to be early adopters of electric vehicles and some research has shown that there's a correlation between some demographic factors like income and number of cars you already own and the likelihood that you will own an electric vehicle in the early market.

And so a number of the grantees including Southeastern Pennsylvania made estimates of the spatial distribution or where early adopters of electric vehicles are likely to be located and that can help states and localities and also private businesses target areas that are good spots for stations that will be utilized in those early months and years.

Another way to crack the nut is to think about what are the types of locations that an electric vehicle station would be used and that's the approach of the northeast regional grantee. When they identified nine different sweet spots—location types that they called clusters—you know, universities, fleet stations, hospitals, transit locations, the workplace, like we mentioned before, retail and some others and they went through and identified, you know, what are these stations like. What are the opportunities that these locations offer? What are the issues that these locations present and then they offer some case studies as well to make it real.

On the corridor side the Texas Triangle grantee looking into to what extent private companies seeking a profit are likely to target corridors and install stations on the corridors in their regions—transportation corridors. So they used a financial model like the one that we talked about earlier—the net present value one—and input some assumptions and they show how there are a few sections on the corridors that within five to ten years it's reasonable to expect that a private company may indeed seek to put in a DC fast charger on that corridor that would enable some corridor travel by electric vehicle owners.

But on the other hand the majority of the length of these corridors is unlikely to be profitable within ten years based on their projections and so in those areas it may be necessary for a public roll-in of installing stations if transit—electric vehicle travel—excuse me—along these corridors is a public policy goal.

And so shifting gears a little bit we're going to be moving out of the charging part but still talking a little bit about charging there's this—as we mentioned before—the workplace is an important location for installing charging and a number of the grantees looked into what makes that challenging and how to overcome that challenge. And so some of the obstacles to installing workplace charging and some of you are probably very familiar with this is the low early demand in utilization of the station. It may not be familiar to employees and employers. There may be physical constraints like the sight to sign and stuff we were talking about with the panels and the location and parking restrictions.

There could be legal restrictions on offering charging to employees. For instance if you give it away for free, is that a taxable benefit? That can be a barrier—having some uncertainty about those issues. And then most importantly there this you have to reach consensus among a diverse set of stakeholders that can include the employees, those that do and don't want charging, the employers themselves.

The parking facility may be managed by a third party as well and they need to be brought into the mix and then there may even be another third party which is—you may have a third party managing the charging stations themselves. So lots of folks at the table. Lots of asymmetric information and so the grantees worked to try to fill in those information gaps and make it less of a mystery so the things you get done in this area of workplace charging to be installed.

The Oregon grantee interviewed a number of employers who already offer workplace charging to try to understand their experiences. They found that the ability to do some green marketing around the corporate identity—the company's identity to be able to say we offer electric vehicle charging and it's something we're proud as part of who we are is a benefit that was very important to these companies as was the availability of incentives—financial incentives for both federal and state for putting in the infrastructure.

Another really important factor was having an employee who really champions the cause and for that reason a number of the grantees developed materials to help employees educate their employers and advocate for charging installation.

And lastly Oregon sort of noticed that some of these issues are quite real and need to be overcome and some of them are less real and just need to be dispelled. And of course the EV everywhere workplace charging challenge that DOE administered and some of this information filtered into that and that program is under way and quite successful in getting some workplace leaders to install charging and understanding their experience as well.

Moving on here to the role that some other players play and moving away from—talking about site design for charging. Local governments are a very important actor in getting communities to be ready for electric vehicles and particularly to make it easier to install the stations. So a number of the grantees—this was a focus for many of them to produce toolkits that make it easier for the thousands of localities to figure out what kinds of policies they want to implement and support electric vehicle readiness to the extent that it's appropriate in their community.

And so some of these toolkits included things like language for incorporating into challenge master plan including definitions which are an important part of that plan for electric vehicle terms, updating zoning ordinance to say what types of charging infrastructure is allowed in different types of zones under what different types of permitting levels. There's also building and electrical codes that can be clarified to make it easier to do these installs and can even be updated to actively support station deployment with measures like requiring new buildings and facilities to put in conduit for charging stations and parking lots or even prewiring them or even providing a station if the parking lot is a certain size.

Some localities may have such a high level of desire for supporting the station deployment but they want to go so far as to include those measures in electrical and building codes and lastly streamlining permitting inspection of stations while insuring that safety is preserved as well.

And in addition to the toolkits there's also these issues and important roles of local governments to regulate the public parking in their town especially when those parking spaces have stations at them—public stations—and these issues around how do you enforce or to what extent do you enforce conventional vehicle parking and at a parking space that has a station or an electric vehicle parked in that space that's not charging and also signage directing drivers to these charging stations as well.

And so there's a lot of activity there. Just as an example, the Michigan grantee put together a toolkit that provides a lot of those different types of materials and model language and presents it in this framework where a community can self-identify what level of support for EVs they want to exert. And so, you know, are you a community that is accepting of EVs that just wants to enable folks to adopt them but doesn't want to actively support it all the way up through encouraging EVs to being assertive about EVs.

You want to actively promote their adoption in your community. And by following their toolkit you can self-identify which of these levels that your community is and find helpful language for your local ordinances that are—that show these levels of support.

Utilities also will play a very important role—electric utilities. They need to understand what the impacts of electric vehicles will be on the grid, particularly local distribution infrastructure and they also need to make sure that the generation capacity is sufficient to meet the demand—the increased demand that might come down the road for having a lot of electric vehicles.

And so to support those missions they need—they may choose to set up notification protocols where folks in their service territories may report in some way when they buy an electric vehicle and where they live or when charging stations are installed—particularly high power DC fast charging stations that are more likely to impact the grid.

Utilities can also play an active role in making it more favorable for electric vehicle owners to operate their vehicles and to make the use case for an electric vehicle more favorable by offering special rate—electricity rates—and one example of these is that it would be a time of use rate that electricity would cost less per electric vehicle owner if they charge at night and the benefit of that for the utility of course is that the electricity demand at night is lower and so that lowers cost for everybody and make it easier to manage the grid as well.

There may be some cases where local distribution infrastructure is challenged by clusters of EV adopters who are charging at high power levels and that may require some distribution grid upgrades down the road and then there may be a role as we touched on a little bit earlier for utilities to actually offer charging services themselves and that's an open question right now that we talked about at the state level across the country.

If utilities aren't going to be involved they're likely going to be involved in supporting other private companies in providing charging services. And lastly electric utilities also will likely be involved in pilot programs for smart grid technologies where electric vehicles can act as distributed power storage systems throughout the grid to help provide grid services, deliver power when needed from batteries located all around the grid in what's called vehicle to grid or vehicle to building technologies and this is a very new technology and potentially could be very valuable and utilities will likely play a role in piloting some programs in this and are already doing so.

And so we'll dive into a couple of those in this sort of hot button issue about who will provide the charging services. Some grantees looked into that. The Ohio grantee looked into, you know, whether charging providers can legally resell electricity given that electricity sales are regulated in the state and they believe that they can. And the Kansas City grantee looked at making a case for utilities to provide charging services and what it would look like to allow the utility to recover costs associated with providing those services.

And then on the impact side Kansas City grantee put together—they worked with a consulting engineering firm to model what the effect of EVA—electric vehicle adoption, would be on the grid. And so they had a grid modeling and they found that, you know, they ran many, many scenarios but one sort of high level takeaway is at 1% – if electric vehicles make up 1% of light duty vehicles according to their model there are no impacts on the distribution infrastructure.

If they make up—and we're not even at close to 1% yet. If they make up 20% which would be great there may be some stress on—there may be some stress on local residential distribution systems. And so this image on the right shows one scenario in one neighborhood but it just provides an example where you can see that what their model provides their community for planning is, you know, if you're at 20% of the light duty being electric vehicles, you may in this community have one transformer being overloaded and you go all the way up to 100% and can get a sense of, you know, what the stress on the grid will be.

And this is very valuable because I think in a number of communities folks may be concerned about, you know, is our grid ready and this is a way of rationalizing that discussion and understanding from an engineering perspective just what the effect could be.

Just a couple of more main topics here and then we'll be done and open it up to questions. But really a critical part of a lot of the plans as well was outreach and communications, trying to raise awareness about electric vehicles, dispel myths about them, get people in and driving them and understanding them for really a diverse set of audiences. And so there's a lot of material here.

The advantage of material for folks who weren't involved directly with these and who might be interested in doing similar activities in your communities that a lot of these materials can be used directly in other communities. And so folks can stand on the shoulders of these grantees and take advantage of what they put together for their communications plans and they're as diverse as television programs, electric vehicle ride and drives, workshops with local policy makers to get them up to speed and show them some of these toolkits, we were talking about.

Promoting cost of ownership tools with consumers to get consumers to understand the savings that can come over the lifetime of owning an electric vehicle, you know, website portals that give information, holding press conferences to get mass media attention, putting together templates so that localities can also put together their own communications plans and New York even put some information on their 311 system so that folks who dial in can get more information on electric vehicles.

There were also in addition to sort of these public awareness programs, there were specific training and outreach programs to a number of groups who need—could benefit from more skills based training including automotive technicians and dealers and a number of stakeholders down the chain that could benefit from more knowledge about electric vehicles.

And so lastly, you know, these were one year projects approximately but they're not meant—the impacts aren't meant to be limited to one year. In fact the most important part of all of these projects was that folks in these communities—a diverse set of stakeholders started working together on this issue of making communities ready for electric vehicles. And so, you know, to get this done—to get the infrastructure and the policy environment into a state where it's much easier for a consumer to buy and operate an electric vehicle, it's going to take policy makers. It's going to take planners, utilities and power providers.

It's going to take the interest of developers and employers and retail folks. It's going to take maybe third parties coming in and providing the charging for profit. It's going to need the cooperation of the OEM's and the dealers and the servicers of the vehicles and fleet managers who incorporate electric vehicles into their fleets and just on the right this is one of the meetings of the North Carolina grantee. Just—this is an example—get the people in the room.

I'm sure, you know, I'm preaching to the choir here about that but this is a really important component—probably the most important part of these plans. And it's not just about the local results. A lot of these folks put together plans for partnership that could be emulated by other communities as well.

So that wraps up this marathon sort of whirl wind tour of the report, you know. If you walk away with any one message from this I hope it's that you take a look at this report yourself and get in touch with some of the information that these grantees put together under this program that could be valuable to you working in your community on EV readiness.

And so thank again to my colleague Nick Nigro here at C2ES and again to Linda who's on the call and Shannon at the DOE and Marcy and Dan at ANL for supporting this work. And I hope this is a useful report for you all and I'm happy to answer questions.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Matt thank you very much. You know, I can't say enough about the results on this report. Of course it reflects some really, really great work that were done by partnerships all across the country, a lot of whom worked with our local clean cities coalitions. And I want to put out a sincere thanks to all of them for all of their hard work and actually continuing to progress and a lot like as Matt said, a lot of these partnerships continued to meet.

And what we're hearing is that the numbers of bills such as incentive bill and other legislation at the local level like codes and ordinances are being passed and also information is being still given out from these grants—from the grant templates that were produced. So we're getting some great stories back and at some point we want to circle back and collect some of the success stories from these grants but as you can see, this represents an enormous body of work with a lot of things that other communities can pick up and take and redesign for their own area without having to completely reinvent the wheel so that was one of the thoughts there.

So we'd like to open it up to any questions that folks might have about the report or things in the report. We do have a few people who participated in some of these community readiness programs also on the line here so we could direct a few if Matt and I can't answer them. So I'm not sure if we have any questions Sandra but if we could go ahead along with that, that would be great.

COORDINATOR: Okay. At this time we'll open the lines for questions. If you would like to ask a question please press star one and record your first and last name. To withdraw your question, please press star two. Again to record a question please press star one and record your first and last name. One moment while we wait for our first question.

SANDRA LOI: Great, thank you. This is Sandra Loi. I just—there was a question that came in on the web and probably a lot of folks are interested as well about the slide decks being made available. Matt I'm going to assume that yes, we can go ahead and share it and post it on the Clean Cities archive pages after the webinar.

MATT FRADES: Yes, of course.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, great. So yes folks and folks that are on the attendee list I'm also happy to send that out via email to your email addresses but we will also post it on our Clean Cities webinar archive pages for future viewing.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Also I just want to point out that this is all on a report and there's a link in Matt's presentation to the report and also in the email that Sandra sent out to you. It's also on the Clean Cities website. But the report is where you're going to get all the links to these topic areas and then you can, you know, click on those and get to the exact place. You'll notice it on the webpage. All the reports for all the 16 grants are on them and it'll actually locate you to the exact page that you need to go to get into that report.

And so, you know, it'll be real helpful and useful if you're doing some research. So that's what we wanted. We wanted communities to come in and research this to have a real easy time getting through these 16 grants and all the paperwork and documents associated with them.

MATT FRADES: I'd also add too also on that same website there's a link to an interactive map that can help you sort of talk another slice on this stuff which is a regional slice. The map at the beginning of this presentation is actually a screenshot of the interactive map that you can click on the different regions and get a better sense of that and even by clicking on the regions you can click on hyperlinks to the materials that were produced by each region through that map portal. And so that's another way to think about this if you're interested in what projects are close to you.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Sandra, I noticed there's some questions on line. If we don't have calls if we could read those. I can't get to some of them.

SANDRA LOI: Yes, no problem. Is there—operator are there any calls on the line or no?

COORDINATOR: No, there are no questions at this time.

SANDRA LOI: So Linda I think you kind of answered this but there's a question that just came in. There's a common repository for documents from the grantees and that's on the website that's listed right here on the slide that's not unintelligible correct. So we'll go ahead and send that out again.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Just the slides—if you go to the first, you know, the cover page of his slides and I think also somewhere else within the document there's a link that goes straight to the area where all—where everything is including this report. And at some point in the very near future we will also have available to the general public aside from just our clean city coordinators who beta tested it but our PEV community readiness scorecard which we're getting OMB approval to open it up to a wider audience. So we'll probably be launching that and having a webinar on that in the near future.

SANDRA LOI: Right, thanks. And we had another question—go ahead Matt.

MATT FRADES: Well I was just going to add, you know, if you look through the report and you find something that's interesting, another great way to learn more is to get in touch with the folks who put together this material which in many cases are your fellow clean cities coordinators. And so again I'm probably preaching to the choir but it's pretty transparent as to who produced this stuff and we'll likely be updating with success stories and experiences down the road but you don't have to wait for that. You can get in direct touch with these folks. There's a broader community there as well.

SANDRA LOI: Thanks Matt. Another question that came in is someone for looking for some advice. For a small community organization trying to break into city regional government to offer themselves as a resource—what would you recommend to those folks?

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Well I mean I guess it kind of depends on what they're trying to do. But, you know, I imagine if you're in an area where there's one of these projects, you probably want to introduce yourself to the principal people on the project. I would also think it's a good idea to talk to your clean cities coordinators in the localities. Matt do you have anything else?

MATT FRADES: I think there are some materials as well. I think you mentioned number one and number two on the order business but there's some other things that you could add to that there in the report. Let me back up. There's—so the Ohio grantee put some templates together that can help inform a small organization could work with localities to help inform their citizens. California has a number of details on some community workshops they did—they conducted with local policy makers to try to educate them on the policy issues. And of course most importantly there's the toolkit.

And so I think the first step in trying to engage local communities is to think about exactly what their role is. That's laid out pretty clearly in the report so that might be a useful chapter to take a look at. Understand, you know, what can local communities do and then once you understand what they can do and start working with them to figure out what they're willing to do and maybe be a little convincing and there's a lot of materials that can help with that process that can be accessed through this report as well.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: And also a lot of regional planning organization at the local level, you know, are looking into this right now and they may be really good contacts for you as well. Some of our clean cities coalitions are housed in regional organizations but the planners are, you know, maybe looking at this in your community so that would be another really good place to go and talk to people about what's going on.

SANDRA LOI: Great, thank you. Operator, any phone calls—phone questions?

COORDINATOR: No, there are no questions at this time. I'd like to remind participants if you would like to ask a question, please press star one and record your first and last name.

SANDRA LOI: Great. Thank you. Another question that came in on the web—can you give some examples of utility incentives and are they in the guide?

MATT FRADES: Sure, yes. I think the most obvious utility incentive is going to be different rates—alternative rate structures for the electricity that's used to fuel the vehicles. And so that has—that's the obvious incentive. There may down the road be some opportunities to explore some differentiated rate about demand charges but I don't think we're there yet.

And so if you ask just about the incentives I think the utility role that comes to mind for me is the alternative rates which are discussed in the report as you asked but there are other roles for the utility to play that include outreach because the utilities are the primary point of contact for a lot of folks out there—consumers who are for energy issues. And so there may be opportunities for utilities to educate and that's not strictly an incentive but that does have a potential effect on EV adoption in a community.

And then there's also the potential utility role to provide the stations themselves in some markets and that may of course help to reassure consumers that they'll be able to charge the vehicles in their communities. Do you have anything to add to that Linda?

LINDA BLUESTEIN: No, I was going to mention time of use rates. But, you know, there may be other incentives too where utilities are actually helping the, you know, working to help pay down vehicles and, you know, other types of incentives and I don't have a list of all of them here but they could vary somewhat.

SANDRA LOI: Great. One more on the web. Have you heard or have any additional information on the adopt-a-charger program?

MATT FRADES: I have not but I might be getting my wires crossed. Linda do you know?

LINDA BLUESTEIN: An adopt a charger program? I mean I think what they're probably talking about is people, you know, buying a charger kind of like you might buy a park bench at a park and put your name on it or it's like your little gift to the community or something but I don't know of anything—I'm not aware of anything specifically but, you know, I think it's an interesting idea.

Obviously if you're putting in public charging it could get pretty expensive so I'm not sure how that would work but it's an interesting idea. I'm thinking that's what they're discussing here.

MATT FRADES: Yes, I did hear something about like a charging co-op model. To my knowledge it wasn't the focus of any of the grantees but to the extent that some community has a committed set of folks who are really wanting to put this in and willing to pony up some money to do so, that seems like it could be a viable model but I don't have a lot of examples to bring to bear on this.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Yes, it's kind of like the pothole in the road model.

COORDINATOR: We have a question. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: No, go ahead.

COORDINATOR: Okay we have a question from the audio from Cynthia Mayes and your line is now open.

CYNTHIA MAYES: Hi. This is Cynthia from Clean Fuels, Ohio. I just wanted to provide a little more information about the Ohio templates for local communities. What we are doing—we're having workshops in different areas of the state where we invite all of the local municipalities and we'll talk about the different templates that we have for model permitting codes, building codes, zoning codes.

We also have—as Matt mentioned—the templates that local communities can utilize and put those on their own website to inform their citizens about the steps they should take if they're looking at purchasing an EV and want to install charging at home or at their business.

And so what we offer at Clean Fuels, Ohio is we'll either give them the template they can manipulate it and use it or we will customize it for them and then give it to them and then they can post it on their website. So I just wanted to talk about that.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Thank you very much.

COORDINATOR: Our next question comes from Mason Caldwell and your line is now open.

NATHAN CALDWELL: Thank you. That's actually Nathan Caldwell. Hi, I'm actually working a little—my name's Nathan Caldwell. I work for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in our national wildlife refuge division in our very small transportation program. And we're starting to work with Linda and some folks at the VOLPE Center on getting national wildlife refuges involved with the clean cities coalitions.

And one of our ideas to do that is to put EV chargers in parking lots of national wildlife refuges around the country. We think it's a really—we're getting a good demographic in people coming to visit refuges. They're trying to reduce greenhouse gases among other things. And also we think that, you know, offering charging stations in parking lots and national wildlife refuges are a really nice place but to leave the car while it's charging and go birding or hiking or whatever they were going to do on our refuge.

I just wondered if there was any other examples of say state parks, county, regional parks, city parks that have done something like that.

MATT FRADES: None come to mind for me although that definitely doesn't mean that's not being done. One thing that does come to mind is I know the Oregon grantee under this program was exploring the nexus of, you know, electric vehicle drivers and tourism and trying to develop this destination based charging network for folks visiting the state and I bet, you know, given the outdoor opportunities in Oregon that some of those destinations are likely to be, you know, outdoor oriented.

But I know that it also has a real focus on corridor charging as well. So I'm not sure if that had a little bit of overlap with what you're talking about but as far as parks are concerned specifically I'm not sure if it has overlap.

NATHAN CALDWELL: Okay, thank you. Yes, we have several refuges along the—near the I5 corridor and also on the Oregon coast that might be able to take advantage of it. Thank you.

MATT FRADES: Of course. And I think I know someone I could put you in touch with if you send me an email. I know who's working on that tourism stuff although I think they found it to be challenging to get that going but it still might be worth having a conversation.

NATHAN CALDWELL: Sure. I'll be glad to do that. We have—our regional office for Pacific Northwest is in Portland and I think our regional transportation coordinator out there might be interested in touching base with you.

MATT FRADES: Great.

OPERATOR: We have no additional questions at this time.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: I would like to mention that Kim Tyrell who was one of our awardees in the Colorado study—she was working—she works at the lung association there which is meant to say that we should mention that the Alternative Fuels Data Center has a lot of great state laws and federal incentives that can be useful for people when they're researching incentives.

It does not have specific utility incentives though. We haven't gone that far. But I did want to say that the person who was looking at utility incentives—there is an environmental justice program right now in Indiana that I heard of that and the person that you can talk to about this is Carl Lisek who's our clean cities coordinator at South Shore, Indiana. By going on the clean cities website you can get his email address and you could find out about this program.

But they are—it's basically the power company NIPSCO in Indiana is providing a number of grants—community wide grants for infrastructure for all different types of electric vehicle infrastructure. So, you know, that is something that some places might offer on some of these—through the environmental justice programs but that one was particularly interesting. And they're giving away quite a bit of money. I don't know if it's a million or $2 million but it was a fairly good sum of funding.

And then I think somebody on here was asking about—and Matt maybe you know this. I don't know for sure but they're asking if anybody did total cost of ownership with leased vehicles rather than purchased vehicles in any of the studies. I don't recall that but I don't think that would be a huge obstacle.

MATT FRADES: Yes, I don't—I don't specifically recall that but there was enough material on total cost of ownership in three or four of these plans that I would not be surprised if that were in there. And so I can't speak specifically to whether that's there but in the report should point you to what the total cost of ownership stuff is located in these reports and I would not be surprised if leasing was one of the scenarios they considered.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: And then one other question was, are there foundation grants. There's someone who operates for transit and is having difficulty with CMAQ funding and he's in Colorado and I'm wondering if he's spoken to the Colorado Clean Cities Coalition—any of the Colorado Clean Cities Coalitions. There are three of them in the state about trying to connect and find out what kind of private or foundation sources of funding there might be.

So I'm not sure but I would just advise him to go on the clean cities website—webpage—and go under coordinator contacts and get in touch with the Colorado Coalition to find out what—if they know of opportunities.

COORDINATOR: Our next question comes from Sean Flaherty. Your line is now open.

SEAN FLAHERTY: Hey, good afternoon. This is Sean Flaherty with the Centralina Clean Fuels Coalition in Charlotte, North Carolina. Thank you so much for the presentation or webinar this afternoon. I just had one question for Linda or, you know, C2ES or anyone from DOE if any educational materials will be made available that focus on interconnectivity of the different charging standards whether it's CHADMO, SAE or, you know, even Tesla Superchargers Network—the Tesla Supercharger Network for DC fast chargers.

It's kind of interesting. In North Carolina right now we're seeing Nissan North America make a big investment in the deployment of DC fast chargers—some of the first DC fast chargers our state has ever seen but of course they're really only interested in deployed CHADMO standard which, you know, of course will charge a Nissan for any other vehicle that they put out on the line.

And, you know, there's really no guidance. It's kind of like if you were to look at all the different gas stations that are out there—BP offering a different standard for petroleum fuel and, you know, let's say Shell. And so, you know, the problems get real and matriculate quickly when you look at, you know, things like signage or anything else that the average consumer may face when this infrastructure begins to be rolled out.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Great. The only thing I've heard of Sean is I have heard that there are either localities or states and I have to remember where I heard this but they were looking at, you know, putting in some legislation—I think it might have been at the state level—to say that you had to offer at least, you know, that everybody would have to offer that interconnectivity option on the stations and that they would not be—that they would have to offer, you know, if they were in business they would have to offer charging stations that would be able to charge most or all of the vehicles so, you know, vis-a-vie the connector.

So there is some of that afoot right now and I'm going to rack my brain and see if I can think of who told me that and where you might be able to find information. But we do have this interoperability center that's in, you know, at Argonne National Laboratory and they are working kind of on the mechanics of that and trying to sort that out at an international level, not just a national level.

So, you know, we do have information on it and we'll really be thinking about maybe ways to inform people as information comes available but I'll keep you in mind on that issue and try to think of who it was that told me about the legislation.

SEAN FLAHERTY: Alright, thank you.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Sure.

MATT FRADES: Just on the subject of interconnectivity I believe that some of those policies that Linda you were talking about or referring to are also considering compatibility of payment as well.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Right. That's right.

MATT FRADES: Yes, the issue of whether you need to be a member of a particular charging network and states are seeing that as an impediment to access to infrastructure as well. And all of this is sort of being thought of in this really broad question of you want to get the stations out there. Therefore you want to make them financially viable and therefore, you know, people in the private sector are coming up with creative ways to try to—to boost the financial viability of this but that in some cases moves the stations and makes them harder to access for other folks.

And this is a very tricky early market issue but there's quite a bit of work being done and those policies that Linda was referring to are sort of the first widths of the policy angle on this I think.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: And maybe that's a subject of another webinar, you know, we can gather some information and get back to everybody on what we find out on that because it's just sort of emerging and some of these policies are just being talked about for the first time. So I'd like to get a better handle on that too so let's put that on the agenda for one of our next quarterly EV webinars.

SANDRA LOI: Operator, any additional phone questions?

COORDINATOR: There are no additional questions at this time.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: I think there's some on the web that might have come in.

SANDRA LOI: There's one—there's one that just came in again asking if there's a way to order printed materials to be sent to community clubs and organizations to hand out at events such as Drive Electric Week, etcetera, I guess instead of just being downloadable.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: I think, you know, Sandra we might have some. I don't know that we have a huge amount but the manual that was done for consumers for installing recharging at home. That might be something that we could provide some of it to folks out there with some of the coalitions or people that have a specific need for them.

We don't print a lot of things anymore but we should have some of those. It's a manual that really walks the consumer through what's involved with buying electric vehicles especially having to do with, you know, installing the level two charging in your home and the choices you have to make.

SANDRA LOI: Yes, you can just reach out. This is Sandra. Go ahead and email myself or anyone of us here and we can try to address you to that. I know these are larger publications so we typically won't send out too many to any one location but it gives you kind of a good sense of, you know, what's in there and, you know, get likely get a few copies but otherwise you could download it or share it via email as well.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: And then we did get a comment just saying a good area for grants would be for employers for workplace charging and we do have, you know, quite a bit of work going on and workplace charging through the EV everywhere project. And if we ever, you know, get extra funding through that to do these types of installations, that may be a place where we may be able to look in the future to doing some work. But for right now our funding levels are such that we're working more on trying to recruit the employers to do this and, you know, the employees to voluntarily drive their cars into their workplaces.

And I think, you know, a lot of the employers can be sold on this without having to really give them any funding. That's pretty much the premise that we're under because especially larger employers—they want to attract a certain type of employee—somebody who's, you know, really conscientious, tech savvy, you know, not afraid of new technology and, you know, they want to encourage this type of thing in the workplace. And we feel that there's enough pull already but should it slow down or something happen, we can always take a look at that.

I think we're—I think that's pretty much a wrap. I'm not sure if there's anything else—any other comments from anyone.

COORDINATOR: There are no questions in your queue.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay then I think we're—I think we're ready to end the call. I want to thank everybody profusely for joining the call and for your great questions and information that you provided through the Q&A. and I want to thank in particular the partners on all of these grants that are on this call that did such a great job and I want to thank Matt and Nick at C2ES for helping us, you know, kind of get control and master all of this information.

And also my thanks to Argonne National Lab who worked with C2ES to get this report done. So thanks to everyone and we look forward to the next quarterly EV call probably sometime in late spring, early summer.

SANDRA LOI: Thank you.

COORDINATOR: Thank you for your participation on today's conference. You may now disconnect.