Electric Vehicle Summer 2013 Quarterly Discussion Webinar (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Electric Vehicle Summer 2013 Quarterly Discussion Webinar presented on June 18, 2013.

COORDINATOR: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the end of today's presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session.

To ask a question, please press star one. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time.

Now I would like to turn the meeting over to Ms. Sandra Loi. Ma'am, you may begin.

SANDRA LOI: Thank you so much, Brendan. Thank you all for joining us today. This is Sandra Loi from the National Renewable Energy Lab.

I provide technical assistance to the Clean Cities program. Today we're here for our monthly webinar. One of my projects here is that I organize monthly educational webinars about Clean Cities and the latest topics in transportation.

Today we have our EV quarterly discussion webinar, which we started up about two years ago.

Today we're going to talk about a few of our EV Community Readiness Planning projects that several of our Clean Cities coordinators have been involved with.

We're going to highlight three today. Typically our EV quarterly discussion webinars are hosted by our National Clean Cities' co-director, Linda Bluestein.

But today we have Kay Kelly here in her place to do some introductions for you and give you a little bit of background on these projects.

Kay Kelly works through the DOE Golden Field Office as our regional manager for our Pacific and Northwest Region Clean Cities coalitions.

We will be hosting Q&A and we will have that at the end of the webinar. We'd like our presenters to get through their slides and then we will open it up at the end for questions.

As you're listening to the presentations if anything pops into your head feel free to jot it down and please hold it until the end when we'll open up the lines for questions.

Without further ado, I'll let Kay get us started. Kay, you may begin.

KAY KELLY: Thank you very much Sandra and thanks everyone for joining this next installment of our EV quarterly discussion.

As Sandra mentioned we're going to be talking about the EV Community Readiness Awards. Just to give a quick bit of background before we turn it over to the speakers, in 2011, DOE awarded 16 projects across 24 states and the District of Columbia for EV Community Readiness planning with about $8.5 million of federal funding and there was some partner match on many of the awards as well.

These were 18-month projects. Local partners working toward an end-goal of publicly releasable EV Readiness Plans.

Most of those plans are in now and at the beginning of May, we hosted an EV Community Readiness workshop and web cast at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where all the projects were able to get together and share some of the lessons learned and talk about next steps.

The three presentations you're going to hear about today are very similar to the presentations given in Knoxville.

The web cast of that Knoxville meeting is linked in here at the bottom of the slide if you're interested in going back and seeing all the presentations but this will just give you a taste of them today.

Also, if you're looking for any of the EV Readiness plans, all of the results from these 16 projects, the plans and other products are on the web site that you see here, clean cities/electrical vehicle projects, so feel free to visit that page.

I also wanted to mention that in cooperation with our partners at Argonne National Lab we are working on a synthesis report. Right now, we've got several dozen plans when you add all of them up because some of the projects had multiple plans.

So they're working on a synthesis report for us in our readers' guide to help you navigate through all the plans and then find the sections that you're most interested in. Stay tuned for that coming soon.

Also, I wanted to as always to post our information on our three web sites. The Clean Cities web site, the Alternative Fuels and Events Vehicle Data Center, and Clean Cities coordinator contact information just so you have those web sites handy.

I also wanted to remind you that if you want to be included on announcements for future Clean Cities webinars you can email Sandra Loi at the address here and then Sandra also sends out information after these web casts conclude so that you can review the recording and the presentations later as well.

So, without further ado I'm going to begin with our first speaker. We have three speakers today; Kim Tyrrell from Denver, Christina Ficicchia from New York City, and Don Francis from Atlanta.

Kim will be starting us off talking about Project FEVER. Kim has been with the Denver Metro Clean Cities Coalition for two years. She manages programs in the coalition such as the Clean Air for Schools Engines Off Anti-Idling program, she coordinates marketing membership efforts, does education outreach initiatives such as those for Project FEVER, which she's going to talk a little bit about today.

Prior to joining Clean Cities Kim did environmental policy work for the Colorado Energy Office and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

She has over 15 years of marketing and management experience in the corporate and non-profit sectors. Kim has her MBA from the University of Denver and is LEED AP Certified. She also serves on the governor's Pollution Prevention Advisory Board in Colorado.

So please welcome Kim. Take it over.

KIM TYRRELL: Great. Thanks so much Kay. It's really a pleasure to be able to speak to everybody about Project FEVER and just share some of what we learned here in Denver as part of the process for the EV Community Readiness Plan.

Project FEVER was a statewide plan so it encompassed the entire state, which as many of you know Colorado has obviously a very large urban corridor as well as an extensive rural network.

In developing a plan, we really had to take into consideration that we were dealing with these two very kinds of diverse populations and communities.

So that was definitely one of the challenges for us and obviously also an opportunity so it was great.

As far as Project FEVER goes, FEVER stands for Fostering Electric Vehicle Expansion in the Rockies.

Again, it is a statewide plan so what we're going to speak to today is just how we were able to put the plan together in a meaningful way for the entire state.

The first thing obviously, when you're putting a plan together is to identify what the project goals are going to be.

I won't dive into our specific goals for Colorado but just speaking broadly about developing those goals, what do you want the outcomes to be in terms of both your projects and your outreach and education efforts.

For Project FEVER obviously you can see that positioning Colorado as a tier one market was probably our number one goal.

In doing that and identifying that goal we decided to formulate a brand and marketing campaign that would help us achieve that and again, addressing differing audiences.

Colorado, we had 106 partners that were involved in the Project FEVER process from start to finish. We really looked to the expertise of those 106 partners in helping us set the project goals but in turn, also being ambassadors for the project in their various communities.

One of the most important things for us was creating a brand that we thought would kind of sell the campaign, if you will.

Realizing again that we're communicating with a number of different audiences so anywhere from first responders to the general public to legislators.

The idea here was to create something that would be really eye-catching and communicate our message and most importantly I think kind of generate a sense of excitement about electric vehicles.

We went with a look and feel here that was a little bit retro that we thought was very fun and exciting and engaging.

The next part for us was identifying who our target audiences were. I think this is an important part of any kind of education and outreach effort. You have to know who you're communicating to and what the messages are going to be around those communications.

We identified six stakeholder groups. We have fleets and commercials, first responders, dealers and OEMs, developers and property managers, legislators and policy makers, and of course the general public.

With us, it was a little bit of a different perspective for us in dealing with the general public. Oftentimes our work at Clean Cities is more focused on fleets.

This was an exciting opportunity for us to kind of turn the tables a little bit and have an opportunity to work directly with the general public.

I would also say that just in terms of reaching out to a broad audience, we identified that one of our main messages in doing that would be the creation of the electric ride web portal.

This allowed us to reach all of these different target audiences across the state and also for us to do this in perpetuity.

This is something that the electric ride web site now that it's up and running will be there in perpetuity and we can continue to update it and refresh it as need be.

For each of the different audiences that we identified we had different, I would say, speaking points and topics of interest that we knew were important to those different audience groups.

I think it's important when you're identifying who your audiences are to determine what their priorities are, what their concerns are and what are the opportunities that you see for that particular group.

Obviously for fleets, we were looking at what their duty cycles in fleet routes were, obviously the costs and benefits of EV adoption.

For first responders the focus is on safety and training so we partnered with the local community college to deliver several training sessions which I think was very impactful.

For dealerships and OEMs, what we found is that selling electric vehicles is definitely a different paradigm than selling traditional vehicles.

We've worked with OEMs and I think dealerships on what this new paradigm may be in and what we found is that buyers are coming into dealerships very educated on the product typically.

A lot of times they are looking simply for the transaction of, I've already done the research, I'm just ready to go ahead and make the purchase, to the other side where they come in wanting a lot of information.

I think the dealerships need to kind of be prepared for that so that's something that we've been working with local dealers here in Denver just to kind of help them adjust where there's adjustments that need to be made. It's actually been a really exciting opportunity for us.

In terms of developers and property managers we tried to turn to experts who - in the field so we looked primarily with the local USGBC chapter and with BOMA which is the Building Owners and Managers Association.

In working with those two groups in particular they helped us identify who the experts in the industry were to help us frame the discussion in the correct way, clarify any technical issues that we might need clarification on and just get us in front of the right stake holders. I think that was a really important partnership.

In terms of legislators and policy makers, I think one of the most important things to keep in mind is we – many of us work with legislators and policy makers on a regular basis.

In working with this project on the EV Community Readiness Plan it was very important for us to take a step back and remember that we are fuel-neutral and technology-neutral.

Sometimes it's a little bit easy I think to get carried away on some of these different programs but I think it's very important to just kind of keep the big picture in mind and know that this is one technology and one fuel type.

I think the other thing that was important to know about working with legislators and policy makers as well as the general public is just dispelling a lot of the myths around a particular technology and working with them to understand how the implementation of that technology would work in their particular situation or in their community.

A lot of our communications with those audiences were kind of centered around that.

This is just a screen shot from the electric ride web portal. This is something we actually went through an RFP process and looked at several different web communication firms in developing the web site and the look and feel and the functionality.

This turned out to be a great web site. It has cost calculators, it has information on the whole supply chain if you will in looking at someone who is just maybe thinking about an electric vehicle to someone who is actually ready to purchase one to a building and owner who's ready to install EVSE on their property. It just has a wealth of information.

We were able to have terrific support for our project at the state level. I think that's important for any of these projects. It definitely lends credibility to your project when you have the support of some of the state agencies.

One of the things that we found was very successful and obviously it didn't cost any money or anything but was just getting a proclamation.

We were able to secure a proclamation that May 17 was Electric Vehicle Day in Colorado. We had a series of events across the state to mark that day.

That was a really great way to get the word out and get some recognition for the fuel and the technology in the state.

Probably the biggest way that we chose to do education and outreach was through a series of outreach events.

It just so happened as far as timing goes that the grant announcement was made in 2011 which also happened to be about the time that the first National Plug In day event was rolled out with the Sierra Club and Plug In America.

We staged a small event here in Denver. It was kind of interesting because initially we weren't sure exactly how many vehicles we could get or where they would come from.

I think we had about I would say 10 vehicles that we kind of had planned to come, some from NREL, some from the city and county of Denver.

It was remarkable to us that at this very first event that we had out of the blue we had five or six Nissan lease owners show up who offered test drives of their vehicles and it was really a terrific event so that was great.

We followed that up in March 2011 by showcasing electric vehicles in the St. Patrick's Day parade. That was really great for us in terms of getting the vehicles out to the general public.

There's about 250,000 people who come to the St. Patrick's Day parade every year in Denver so it's quite a large event.

We had five vehicles that we were able to showcase. That was just a really terrific opportunity to get these vehicles in front of the general public and let them ask questions and actually see the vehicles.

A lot of times they hear about the vehicles in the media but they don't actually see them so that was really great.

As I mentioned, May 17 was declared Electric Vehicle Day in Colorado so we staged a series of events in Steamboat Springs, Colorado Springs, Glenwood Springs, Boulder, Denver and Fort Collins.

We worked with the other two Clean Cities Coalitions in Colorado who were extremely helpful in helping organize events in their different regions so that was a really big success.

We also hosted the Electric Avenue as part of the World Renewable Energy Forum which took place in Denver in May 2012.

We were able to work with some partners to secure a downtown parking lot that was in a prime location. We staged about probably 30 vehicles and different vendors at that event.

It was a two-day event and there was probably about 10,000 people over the course of the two days that kind of made their way in and out. Again, that was a really successful event for us.

The second annual National Plug In Day was held in September of 2012. We staged that at the Forney Museum of Transportation.

As you'll see the vehicle in the picture – we called it the cheese wedge. I think that's a 1979 Sebring electric vehicle.

The theme of our event that year was Electric Vehicles: Then and Now. It was really exciting because we had a 1916 I think it's called a Detroit Coupe.

We had those showcased right alongside the brand new Chevy Volt and Nissan LEAF. It was really great to see how the technology has advanced over the years and see the old vehicles next to the new vehicles.

When we completed our plan in December of 2012, we hosted an event with a local scientist who I think really helped us put everything in perspective in terms of the impacts of electric vehicles, in terms of looking at the positive environmental benefits.

That was another really great way for us to get the message out and position it in a different light than we had for other events.

We used at both of our Plug In Days we decided to showcase these different films, What is the Electric Car? and Revenge of the Electric Car.

Those were both great ways to engage a kind of a broader audience because sometimes people aren't always car events aren't necessarily on their radar but a lot of people might be looking for like, what's a cool film that we could go to this week or this weekend.

This was a great way for us to kind of reach out and engage a different audience than we might necessarily get at just like a car event.

As far as media and coverage opportunity, at the very onset of Project FEVER we initiated a partnership with Channel 7 who is the local ABC affiliate.

We actually included them as part of our strategic plan so I think that was a really great way to get the media involved and have them not just serve as a media source but more as a strategic partner.

They were with us in helping us create videos that went on the Electric Ride web site, they emceed a lot of our events. Whenever we had a news feature, they would actually give us great coverage on the news feature.

It was really great to have them as more of a partner instead of just like another media outlet.

I would encourage anybody who, if you have the opportunity and if you have the connections to go ahead and make that a strategic partnership if that's at all possible.

Then we tried to work with the other news media as well, just getting articles out to them. I would say depending on the event and depending on the message, we had pretty significant success in getting coverage of our different events.

One of the things I think that was our goal from the beginning of this was to make sure that we had metrics to track the success of our program.

I know often times it's easy to get caught up in simply implementing a program and it's easy to forget that, it's helpful to have those metrics.

I would suggest that whenever possible try and quantify the impact of your event. This is helpful in terms of getting sponsors for your events.

If you're going forward and you can say well, we know we had X number of people at this event then that really helps the sponsor make a decision about whether or not this might be an event that they want to be a part of.

I think obviously it can sometimes be challenging to track exactly how many people come in and out of an event so it's helpful to have someone on the staff or maybe you can have a volunteer do this but have them just kind of keep an eye on people coming and going.

Or if you have some sort of system such as admission tickets or items that are sold or given away that you can count then that's a really helpful way to kind of help you put some numbers behind your events.

The past year in Colorado I think because of Project FEVER has been really successful on a number of levels.

The past legislative session we were able to have six new bills regarding alternative fuel vehicles and transportation in the state of Colorado.

Probably the most significant is the extension of the tax credits which is up to $6,000 and also the creation of a fund for future EVSE projects.

Right now they're spending through our regional Air Quality Council. Just with the first round of funding that was awarded in March, it will double the number of electric vehicle charging stations in the Denver metro area so that's pretty significant.

I definitely think that going forward just based on our conversations that we've seen Colorado has moved up as kind of a top-tier market in the marketplace for EVs and that was our project goal. We feel really good about that.

We also have the Drive Electric Northern Colorado project that's happening. That's the installation of Colorado's first DC fast charger, which is great.

House Bill 1247 was the one that extended the tax credit. We also have Senate Bill 126 which disallowed HOAs from prohibiting their residents to install EVFC. Those were all I think successes that we can point to as a result of Project FEVER.

Speaking to lessons learned, I think this was a learning process for all of us. I think going forward we're just a much stronger coalition and we're a much stronger network.

As I mentioned we had 106 partners from across the state that participated in Project FEVER. It's important for us going forward to maintain those partnerships.

That's definitely what we're working on. There's a lot of momentum in the industry. We don't want to lose that momentum.

I would definitely say to all of the other organizations that participated in the EV Community Readiness Plan is to just know your value and don't lose the momentum on these projects.

Everybody worked very hard and we made significant progress so in some ways that was just hopefully the beginning and the stepping stone for much bigger things to come.

That's it. I'm happy to take questions.

COORDINATOR: At this time if you would like to ask a question please press star one. Please un-mute your phone and record your first and your last name. Your name is required to introduce your question.

To withdraw your question you may press star two. Once again, at this time if you would like to ask a question please press star one.

One moment please for our first question.

KAY KELLY: Actually I think we were going to hold questions until the end. Is that right, Sandra?

SANDRA LOI: Yes, but that's fine. If anyone has a quick question we can just jump in now and then close lines and then do the questions then once the next two presentations are completed.

KAY KELLY: Okay.

SANDRA LOI: Are you seeing any on the line, Brendan?

COORDINATOR: I'm showing no questions at this time.

SANDRA LOI: Okay. Why don't we go ahead and continue on with our next presenter.

KAY KELLY: All right, thanks, Kim. Our next presenter is Christina Ficicchia. Christina is currently the executive director at Empire Clean Cities in New York City.

As the executive director, she provides support and management related to the operations of the nonprofit organization along with developing strategies and programs that fulfill its mission, seeking out increased membership enrollment and funding, and promoting the acceptance of alternative fuel fleet vehicles.

She also acts as the US Department of Clean Cities Coalition Coordinator in the New York City and Lower Hudson Valley region.

In this role she collaborates with state, county and federal regulatory agencies, interest groups, media, consultants and other Clean Cities Coalitions across the country to develop policies, coordinate work and exchange information.

She represents the coalition in public and private forums and manages various projects that increase the number of alternative fuel vehicles on the road and that increase alternative fuel use to facilitate petroleum reduction including the EV project that she's going to present on today.

Christina also coordinates various local events related to promoting alternative fuels and alternative fuel vehicles and develops unintelligible policy and long range organizational goals.

Welcome, Christina. The floor is yours.

CHRISTINA FICICCHIA: Hi, good afternoon everyone. Can everyone hear me okay?

KAY KELLY: Perfect.

CHRISTINA FICICCHIA: I don't know, that bio, it seems like it's four different bios put together. I may have to edit that down so I apologize for that.

I am Christina Ficicchia with Empire Clean Cities. As you can see from our first slide, we really are working in New York City and Lower Hudson Valley and Promoting Green Fleets for a Sustainable Community here locally.

Today I'm going to talk about our New York City Electric Vehicle Readiness and Planning program that we worked on through the DOE grants.

Just to kind of give everyone a little bit of an overview we also work to a small part on the larger northeast regional grants through NYSERDA and PCI which was a really great partnership as well.

This particular grant focused on some of the urban-specific needs and areas that are pretty specific to New York City but we realized as we were going through the processes and now that we're seeing where the rest of the country is going and where the electric vehicle industry is moving that there are a lot of really interesting pieces that we focused on here that I think are going to have a lot of impact in other parts of the country that may not be as urban as New York City.

I just wanted to point out all of our different partners. We did start the program as a three-city partnership with Boston and Philly to try to make a connection there particularly looking and thinking about how electric vehicles will move in between those urban areas.

We worked closely with our city DOT and we also worked very closely with the mayor's office who helped put this plan together.

Most importantly - or not most importantly - but as importantly we worked with our local utility Con Edison to talk about some of their rate issues and some of the electricity demands that may be being created through increased electric vehicle adoption.

Just to kind of give a little bit of an overview, the nuts and bolts on the planning side, the New York City mayor's fund in the Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning engaged an investigation to solve policy, legislative and grid barriers.

We all collaborated together as I mentioned, DOT, Con Edison and our other partners to come up with this planning study to look at some of those specific issues on electric vehicle adoption and charging which I'll talk about in just a minute here.

I just want to mention that we were really lucky in our region because the mayor's office, a couple of years ago, had gotten McKinsey to do a study on EV adoption in the New York City area.

We were able to take a lot of that information and expand on that information in this particular study, which actually that's my next slide. Sorry about that.

In 2010, that study looked at EV adoption in New York City and what New York City's role was going to be and basically came up with three major issues that needed to be overcome.

One of those being increasing the charger accessibility, improving vehicle economics is the second and then conducting public outreach.

As I mentioned because we had that guidance and some of that information, data collection and analysis a few years ago we are a little bit ahead of the game and were able to focus in on those specific issues and try to tackle them, so we did.

One of the first things I'll talk about is increasing charger access. What we realized through some different studies is that a large percentage - as you can see in that graph there, 42% - of parking permitted in the last few years has been in Manhattan.

We wanted to make sure that the building codes were updated so that those new parking facilities would be "EV ready."

Something that we also looked at was curbside charging. I just want to mention something about New York City and electric vehicles and just vehicles in general.

It was really interesting from a perspective that in New York we really don't necessarily want to promote more vehicles being on the road, not even electric vehicles for that matter.

It was a difficult philosophical conversation to have in terms of, well, we need to prepare for electric vehicles coming on the road, we need to think about where they're going to charge but then again we are in an area where we want to promote consumers and residents and visitors to take a subway and to walk, and with our new bike share program to ride bikes and get out of their vehicles.

So this interesting juxtaposition to promote a vehicle but without necessarily adding the number of vehicles that we're going to have onto the road.

Another interesting juxtaposition is that in New York City streetscape, sidewalk, curbside, where you'd think that it would make sense to maybe park some vehicles and charge some vehicles, there's a lot of competition for that curb access.

Whether or not the city is going to put curbside charging accessibility and implement that in the new future or something I think is still to be decided.

Then again, we still wanted to look at the possibility of having curbside charging because we do feel that if electric vehicles are going to be deployed on a mass scale some of them are going to need at some point perhaps be charged on the street.

So in this capacity looking at it from a study aspect, what we did is we looked at where is the problem or something that we're interested in looking at but that we can also get some information and analysis about whether or not curbside charging is going to work.

We have, as you know, a lot of places around the rest of the country, food trucks, food carts and food trucks that are on the street are the big new craze. We have them all over in New York.

They kind of just sit there and they idle and they're not the best environmental stewards as of yet even though they are really popular. We knew that that was an issue and we knew that the city isn't necessarily condoning them to be parked on the curb there, by looking at the study, but in either case those are two issues that we wanted to look at.

Those are two issues that we wanted to look at. One, what do we do with these food trucks that are sitting and idling while they are running their trucks on the curb; and two, what do we do when we want to look at electric vehicle charging for the future.

We said why don't we look at whether or not that can be married together and see if we can lay the groundwork for electric vehicle curbside charging by also putting in electricity for those food trucks to potentially plug in and turn their engines off and stop idling.

We looked at the possibility of that in a sub-study through the planning study and in short realized that it would reduce overall emissions but also prepare the city if in the future we wanted to add curbside charging.

Those are the kinds of things that we are thinking about in terms of planning for the future. While we may not be ready policy-wise or infrastructure-wise to implement some of the things that we know may be necessary for large electric vehicle adoption didn't mean we that we couldn't necessarily look at those options and look to see if that was going to be feasible or not.

Another area we looked at was fast charging. There's a picture of a New York City taxi there and the New York City EV taxi program has been released and is up and running.

Still to be seen whether or not that's going to be feasible for the city and in particular the mayor and had also recently - I think about two months ago - made an announcement that a third of our taxis, he wants a third of our taxi fleet to be electric vehicles by I think 2020. I believe that's what it was.

In order for that to happen, with the current electric vehicles that are on the market today, like the Nissan LEAF, the range is a lot lower than the range that a traditional New York City taxi would run during a shift.

They would need multiple charging and maybe some charging in Manhattan. We wanted to look at ID'ing locations and what that meant. There are a lot of economic and feasibility challenges that came along with that, that were really a necessity in terms of analyzing.

Part of that is because in Manhattan, we have really high peak load demands and it's a pretty dense urban area.

So, one, it's hard to find space for anything, let alone a fast charger. And two, because electricity prices are so high already and those high peak demand charges are really high, was it going to be economically feasible to have fast charging in the city.

Some studies showed that it was actually going to be more expensive depending on the current rate structure for electric vehicle taxis at the capacity they're at to charge in the city but that's still being looked at and I think the taxi pilot is going to give us more data and information on what those real electricity costs are going to work out to.

Just to let you know, so three locations I think ultimately. I know for sure two locations in Manhattan but I think they were looking for three specific locations for the taxi pilots for fast charging.

Then another thing that we did that I think that was really important was create this training manual for parking garage attendants. In New York most people actually don't have a garage so they park in a parking garage so you pass your keys along to a parking attendant and have the parking attendant park your car. That means if you have an electric vehicle they'll also be charging your vehicle.

We developed a training manual for garage attendants that included a lot of sign-age and re-training and pretty basic information so that when a new parking attendant came along they would have the basic information and know what to do with an electric vehicle.

We also did some training through the program as well. At the time, Beam took that project on. I believe they recently were bought out.

Improving vehicle economics is something we really needed to look at and so we looked particularly EV car share, whether or not car share was a good match and we decided yes, it was because of the range of most trips they were taking during car-share it seemed that there would be very few instances where there wouldn't be enough time to charge in between and charge up the vehicle in between the next reservation.

Time-of-use metering. This is another issue in New York where we wanted to figure out if there was going to be an ability to use specific time-of-use rates for electric vehicle charging and that would mean a second meter, which is pretty costly.

We looked – Con Ed is looking at using sub-metering or other alternatives so that customers can take advantage of what is the equivalent of a second meter without incurring the large costs of adding that second meter.

There will be some information coming out in the near future so stay tuned on the news. If you follow New York City news, you may hear some new rate information.

The third thing is from an economics perspective, vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-building, vehicle-to-house, however you want to put it, there is an opportunity to perhaps help manage your electricity and your energy demands using electric vehicles.

We wanted to make sure that that was going to be something the city could take advantage of. There are a lot of obstacles still preventing v-to-g, v-to-b to really actually happening right now.

That being said though, the city is looking to make sure to install larger conduits in areas where they can to prepare for v-to-g, v-to-b in the future.

Conducting public outreach. Again, I think that I won't go over this too much because I agree a lot with what happened in Colorado. We had a lot of the same kind of conclusions and did a lot of the same sorts of events.

We actually, at one of our plug in days in Times Square, we had a Nissan LEAF dealer come over and hug one of my staff members because he basically said that he was able to sell 14 more or less, he couldn't sell the vehicles there but he felt that he was going to sell 14 vehicles because of that event.

In Times Square, it's closed to traffic so they weren't even actually riding the vehicle they were just touching the vehicle. So it's really important to get consumers out to see the vehicles and to see them.

Another good thing about, a nice thing about car-share is that it allows for that ride-and-drive experience by being able to rent an electric vehicle car-share versus maybe a traditional car-share as well so that's something that we looked at.

Mission Electric was our big outreach campaign. The sites a little bit dormant now but if you want to check back on it, and check on our site there are some things that are going to be moving by the end of the month.

We ran a few campaigns at Mission Electric. One was a map-based program so we said - similar to what they did in Colorado in a few instances - rather than try to organize events and have people that may not be interested in electric vehicles, trying to get them to come to our events, we said there's a ton of events happening over the summer in New York. Why don't we go and crash them and "electrify" them.

We let consumers go online and vote which street fairs or which events they wanted us to come and crash and electrify by bringing electric vehicles to. Those are pretty successful and it was a different approach.

Again, Clean Cities has always worked directly with fleets and this is an opportunity for us to work with consumers and the outreach approach was a lot different and it was kind of fun to do it from a different angle.

A second and third campaign that we ran was one with Hertz Connect, their electric car. I believe they're re-branded to Hertz 24/7. We allowed consumers to go on and vote and say which of their parking garage locations were going to get an EV.

This was really interesting in terms of quantifying our outreach. We got about a thousand visitors and 400 FB likes - Facebook likes - out of that. We would have liked to see more but at the same time I think it was a really interesting PR and customer engagement opportunity.

Another campaign that we ran was an E-truck challenge. Duane Reed - which is our local pharmacy - was deploying a number of electric trucks with electric trucks.

We allowed consumers to go on and vote which neighborhood was going to get a service and a delivery from their electric trucks. Basically saying I live in this neighborhood. I'd rather have an electric truck deliver my goods to Duane Reed that I'm going to pick up later by foot than a diesel truck.

We had a little bit larger of a visitor impact from that campaign. That was our web site for this. Just wanted to kind of show that was the Duane Reed truck at Plug In Day.

Sometimes it's of those things – this picture is in here because some of those things, particularly consumers in New York don't really understand the supply chain of, I'm going to go pick up my toothpaste at the local pharmacy but I'm walking there, I'm taking the subway there, so I'm not creating any emissions.

They don't make the connection to the rest of the supply chain that that toothpaste had to get there somehow and most likely it was in a truck.

The fact that we can get an electric truck on the road making those deliveries and take some diesel trucks off the road reducing our emissions is a really interesting outreach tool, an educational tool to get consumers to really understand the importance of electric vehicles and electric trucks out there today even if they're not going to be the drivers of them or even own electric trucks or electric vehicle.

Electrified events. I just wanted to show a few pictures. We had an electric Ford drive out onto the Staten Island Yankee game and our intern threw the first pitch. Again, going to an event where people aren't expecting to see something around electric vehicles.

They're there for a different event but yet they got some information about an electric vehicle and some information that they may not have known before coming to that event.

We also had coupling with other like similar events. There was a BMW ActiveE showcased at dasHaus in White Plains. dasHaus was – the German consulate had this 100% sustainable house that was off the grid. We also brought a BMW ActiveE there and plugged it into their off-the-grid house to show that you can have a complete off-the-grid sustainable lifestyle that way.

So again, educating people on the built environment side about the opportunity to also improve their transportation, their emissions off of their transportation.

There is my information. If you have any questions - I know that we'll hold them until the end - but feel free also to email me directly.

SANDRA LOI: Thank you.

KAY KELLY: Thank you, Christina. Our final presenter will be Don Francis from Atlanta Clean Cities. Although Don became the coordinator for the Atlanta Clean Cities coalition in April 2009, he is not new to the program.

He actually attended the ceremony when Atlanta was designated as the first Clean Cities coalition in the nation at the Georgia Dome in 1993. A nice tidbit of information considering that Clean Cities will be celebrating our 20th anniversary next week.

Prior to being elected as the coalition's coordinator, Don served on the board of directors and as the treasurer from 2000 to 2005. He has 40 years of experience in automotive engineering, sales, and marketing activities.

He was previously employed by Georgia Power for 31 years, 13 of which he was assigned to the electric transportation program. His primary responsibility was business unit management for the sale, installation, and service of electric vehicle chargers to internal and external customers.

During this time, he served on many local community and industry committees working on EV infrastructure and market development.

Don continues to be active in the EV community. He is a member of the board of directors of the Electric Auto Association and a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers.

So Don, go ahead.

DON FRANCIS: Thanks, Kay. And if I stop talking that means I've had to mute myself because for some reason I've come down with a cold today, it isn't because I have quit talking.

Let's talk about the Southeastern Regional Program we've put together. This was a three-state project covering the states of Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina, involved the three coalitions in the three states, our coalition here in Atlanta, Palmetto State Clean Fuels Coalition in Alabama, Clean Fuels Coalition.

In addition to that, the city of Atlanta was a prime mover in our project and they actually were the predecessor or precursor to this program because we already had a regional EV readiness group up and running as part of the Project Get Ready prior to the awarding of the grant.

The Center for Transportation and the Environment handles our grant administration to make sure that we get our reports in on time, pay the bills correctly.

Southern Company did our grid analysis because they are the primary electrical supplier in both the states of Georgia and Alabama. Clemson University provided a lot of our studies on where vehicles were going to be located. In addition to that with the regional planning commission in Birmingham they did a lot of our GIS analysis.

Again, you've seen this slide so I'll step back this one. Let's talk about what we learned. When we started doing demand forecasts that was one of the first things we looked at which is how many vehicles did we think would be in the region.

We had already established a goal for Atlanta to have 50,000 vehicles by 2015. This was our share of the administration's goal of having a million vehicles on the streets by 2015.

Obviously, that's kind of changed over time but we did establish a goal of 100,000 vehicles on the road by date X. It looks like whether we look at that as a baseline without any incentives, without any work on our part, we would get there by 2020. However, we might get there as early as 2018 on an accelerated program.

We've kind of looked on our grid analysis looking at what we call clusters and corridors. We realized the vehicles are going to be clustered in the primary geographical areas - the major cities in the region - with Atlanta being the primary location as well as Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile in Alabama and Columbia, Charleston, and the Greenville/Spartenburg area in South Carolina.

One of the things we came out of this study with is that about 50% of the vehicles that will be in service in these three states will actually be located inside the 20 county Atlanta MSA so a lot of our focus has been on what's going to happen here.

As part of the grid analysis, we looked at not only what region but what zip code. So we go on down the zip code level as to where the vehicles are going to be and if you look at one of those red zip codes over there it's actually the zip code I live in and there are a lot of plug in electric vehicles I see on the streets here every day.

For example, Nissan has notified us that Atlanta is now the number two market in the country for the LEAF. We passed LA and only San Francisco area is selling more LEAFs per month than they are in Atlanta.

We took a look at the grid impact issue. What would we need to do, if anything, to support a large number of vehicles and basically the forecast that we have come up with says that as long as we manage when charging occurs that one million vehicles in the tri-state area can be handled without any increase in generation, transmission or primary distribution.

One of the areas we do know is an issue is at the transformer at the house that if your neighbor and my neighbor and everybody bought EVs that that transformer out there on the pole may be overloaded and may need to be replaced early.

We put some procedures in place so that the utility is well-notified in advance when those kind of clustering occurs. We didn't think it would happen this soon but we've already been notified there is a subdivision here in metro Atlanta area that has 12 LEAFs in it so we're going to go and start looking at our analysis of the impacts on those transformers.

As everybody else did we did barrier analysis workshops with the usual cast of characters. I won't go into that because what I heard in Knoxville was a lot of the results were the same, that we got the same kind of inputs from each of the groups whether it was property managers, fleet managers, the EVSE manufacturers, the EV manufacturers.

We heard the same issues brought up each time. In dealing with these barriers, we took the ten workshops we conducted in each of the states and then combined them into a single report.

Our workbook was developed from these barrier analyses and we also, in addition to developing the workbook, we did some pilot cities. We chose Spartenburg, South Carolina and Athens, Georgia for our pilot program because there had not been in the past a lot of activity in EVs in either of these markets.

They were kind of starting with a fresh clean sheet of paper when we sat down with them and said here's the things we think you need to be doing. We then, based on their input on what they thought of the workbook, we then had published our first Southeastern Regional EV Readiness Planning Program - I couldn't remember what the acronym that stood for - workbook.

That's a living document. It is up on all of our web sites and we are in the process of actually doing a review and upgrade of it based upon what we've learned since we published the workbook.

It gives everybody what they need to know and it's tabbed out. If you were a customer, you know where to go. One of the things we discovered during our readiness activities was there were a lot of grants and tax credits and other incentives out there but how to get them and where they were located was spread all over the map.

So we organized everything into tabs and one of the tabs is grants and incentives. We have places for customers to go to find out where the tax credits are available, what forms to be used, and we even published a list of individuals who had done it so they could say okay, I like that guy, I understand what's going on here.

It kinds of explains it and puts it into a location where everything is kind of centrally located. It's easy to find.

We have a number of sections in the workbook. We have one that talks about why we're doing this, what's the state of the art. We provide checklists. We kind of pre-dated what's going on with the PE community readiness.

We talk about where a community was, what things needed to be done. Then we had a whole section on case studies, installation guides, we wrote model ordinances and then we referenced where resources were available to support activities.

One of the things that we know is that because we're dealing across a state that three are differences between the three states. We're not all in the same location and I'll talk about what we did there.

At the close of the project then we have in each of the capitals an EV readiness conference. We brought all the stakeholders together and kind of gave them the results.

Here's what we learned, here's the next steps and then again, continuing to solicit feedback. We did this in the three state capitals.

We also set up as far as our education and outreach program a separate web site for each of the states. There was already a Plug In Carolina web site and a Plug In Alabama web site so we went to a Plug In Georgia web site.

Primarily we did this because the incentives are different between the states, the issues at the local level are different between the states. So rather than try and address them on one web site we just have an individual web site per state which then tells individuals in that state what are the things I need to do, what are the things I can, what vehicles are available, what incentives are available to me if I'm looking at a plug in electric vehicle.

One of the things we took a look at and I'll just briefly brush on this is the tax credits. Behind Colorado, we think Georgia has some of the best tax credits at the state level.

We have a program in place called the LEV program here in Georgia where we give tax credits to dedicated alternative fuel vehicles. Ten percent of the cost if it's a propane or natural gas vehicle, 20% of the cost if it's an electrical vehicle. We do some things on vehicle conversions as well as tax credits on EV chargers.

One of the things that's really critical here in the metro area is the access to the HOV or HOT lanes. You can be in the high occupancy vehicle lane, single occupancy or in the high occupancy toll lanes for free. That saves not only 30, 45 minutes a day maybe in commuting but sometimes those tolls are six and eight dollars a day so it actually is one of the best incentives.

It requires a special license plate. It's easy to get for an electric vehicle because obviously we're running on alternative fuels 85% of the time but it's also available to E85 vehicles and others that can document that they are using alternate fuels all the time or 85% of the time.

One of the things we learned is we've got an issue with communication. As you can see here the state has notified us that they have issued 269 tax certificates. These are primarily spread between natural gas vehicles and electric vehicles.

Natural gas vehicles being in propane being in low emission vehicle category and electric plug in battery electric doesn't qualify for the tax credit in the zero emission and then the dollar figures there.

The problem we see here is there's 269 certificates that have been issued but we know there's at least 1,066 vehicles that have been delivered during this period of time so there are people who are getting the vehicles who are not applying for the tax credit.

We don't know what the issue is there; whether it's education or we just don't know. So we started some outreach activities to the dealers as well as the customers to let them know that it exists.

That's a very quick overview of what we've done with our program and I will turn it back to Kay for questions.

KAY KELLY: Thank you. Brendan can we go ahead and open up the lines for questions please.

COORDINATOR: At this time if you would like to ask a question please press star one. Please un-mute your phone and record your first and your last name. Your name is required to introduce your question.

To withdraw your question you may press star two. Once again, at this time if you would like to ask a question please press star one. One moment please for our first question.

SANDRA LOI: Great. Thank you. I just want to say a quick thank you to all of our presenters for taking the time to be on our webinar today and thank you to all who are on the line with me, hanging in with us. Please chime in with questions if you have any.

COORDINATOR: I'm showing no questions at this time. Actually it looks like one just came in queue. I apologize. One moment please.

SANDRA LOI: Not a problem. Thank you.

WOMAN: May I ask my question?

COORDINATOR: Yes, your line is open.

WOMAN: Oh I'm sorry. I wasn't sure how this works. Thank you, Don. This is for Don for your workbook that's available. I'm interested in that. Is that available on your web site for anyone to access and review?

DON FRANCIS: Yes, absolutely. It is not only up on our each of the states' plug in web sites but also on our Clean Cities Atlanta web site. If you go to cleancitiesatlanta.net it comes up on the banner and when it shows up just click on it and you can look at it, download it, and it's a live document.

We will be making modifications to it as we get more done but yes, it is available and open to anybody.

WOMAN: Beautiful. It sounds like a wonderful resource. Thank you.

COORDINATOR: Our next question is from Nina. Your line is open.

NINA KISCH: Hi, everyone. This is Nina Kisch from Pacific Gas and Electric Company. I really liked all the presentations and I'm hoping that you'll make the slides available to us.

SANDRA LOI: Yes, Nina. This is Sandra at NREL. We will be posting the recording as well as the Power Point slides up on our Clean Cities web site in the archive pages. I'll also send a note out to all the participants today to let them know when it's up there and ready for viewing.

NINA KITCH: Wonderful, thank you.

SANDRA LOI: You're welcome. Thank you.

COORDINATOR: Our next question is from Mark. Your line is open.

MARK: Hi, a question for Don in Atlanta. You mentioned the concept of clusters and corridors as a way of thinking about EVs and EV charging geographically which is something that resonates with me. I agree with that.

What did you do in terms of thinking about corridors and I'm thinking of inner city corridors if you're connecting for instance three state capitals how do you get from Atlanta to Columbia or Charleston or Montgomery or wherever else.

What's your thinking for readiness on inner city and interstate corridors?

DON FRANCIS: Good question because we did realize that there would be this need and what we did is prioritized where we needed to go first because we're looking at a situation where we need to spot DC fast charging about every 50 miles up and down these corridors.

We're obviously looking at the Atlanta to Chattanooga corridor first because if we even get to Chattanooga I can get to Knoxville or Nashville because of the EV projects' already deployed chargers.

Now Atlanta was added to the EV project late in the game and we are beginning to deploy chargers on that corridor.

Another area that popped up, we didn't even think about is we have some regions in north Georgia which are – people go to the mountains for the weekends.

We actually have one community in north Georgia that's doing eco-tours and we actually added them as a corridor out of Atlanta up to the mountains of north Georgia so an individual with a LEAF could drive up there.

The other problems will be the distances involved. It's beginning to work out. We're looking at locations and we have some agreements in place to do some DC fast charging at the 50 to 70 mile range outside of Atlanta, Macon to Atlanta is pretty much gone and done but we're still struggling with Atlanta/Birmingham, Atlanta/Columbia, to get that done.

We do know where they need to be and now we're trying to figure up how to get it done.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, thank you. Brendan, any other questions on the phone line?

COORDINATOR: I'm showing no further questions at this time.

SANDRA LOI: Well great. Any of our speakers or Kay, any final thoughts before we wrap up? No? Okay. Well, hearing none, thank you again to all of our presenters. Thank you to all of those listening in today.

As I mentioned we will be posting the recording and the copies of the slides up on the Clean Cities web site and our webinar archived pages. I will send an email in the next week or so letting you all know when it's posted.

If you need them in advance feel free to send me an email. It's sandra.loi@nrel.gov. Thank you again for participating and we will talk to you soon I'm sure. Have a great week.

KAY KELLY: Thanks everyone.

COORDINATOR: This now concludes today's conference. You may disconnect at this time.