Quarterly Meeting for the EV Working Group – FY2024 Q1 (Text Version)

This is a text version of Quarterly Meeting for the EV Working Group – FY2024 Q1, presented on Dec. 12, 2023.

Note for readers: This webinar experienced significant audio issues in the first thirty minutes of recording and begins after initial introductions.

Dr. Rachael Nealer, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Thank you. Barak, would you like to add anything?

Barak Myers, Tribal Transportation Program Coordinating Committee: Barak Myers. Just sorry I didn't make the last meeting. I was actually in Alaska at the National Tribal Transportation Conference that we had there. So, time difference was a little hard to get on the call there. So, in Indian Country, we have a lot of different issues because of the makeup of where reservations are and things. So, we do have some urban reservations located, you know, whether you're in the Seattle area, Los Angeles area, San Diego, some of those areas.

And they already have a little bit of a different approach with the EV. A lot of our issues stem from actually being able to build a grid out to support electric vehicles and having charging stations and things of that nature because the remoteness of some of these areas, there's not even power that you can build one or build these to.

Another thing is just getting that information and the education out there, it's a little bit of a roadblock. And I think that goes for rural America as well, not just Indian Country. As a whole is getting the education out about electric vehicles and about all these alternative ways of providing vehicles for certain things.

My tribe, for instance, we have I think two now electric buses. We're the first in the state of North Carolina to actually have electric buses. And it's trying to get folks to see that, yes, you can have electric vehicles in a bus or maybe even heavy equipment or larger trucks and vehicles.

It's not just driving around the little Volkswagen or the Prius-type of thing. But we are in need to, in Indian Country, of the technical assistance to help go get the funding. So, we understand there's a lot of funding out there, some of it we don't– a lot of us don't qualify for because we weren't designated along alternative fuel corridors because we weren't at the table with the States when they designated them.

But the other portion is having the expertise to go after that funding, to know how to put together a good proposal and things of that nature to get that funding. And some of the barriers that hinder tribes from actually being able to receive the funding that can help build out their fleet or build out their grid so that they can support electric vehicles. And so those are things that are a lot of our priority right now, is figuring out the ways that we can get the funding, but also ways that we can be at the table so that we're not left out of funding because we don't qualify because we weren't on a designated route or things of that nature.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Thank you. And Crystal, would you like to add any comments?

Crystal Philcox, U.S. General Services Administration: Sure. I'm Crystal Philcox, Travel Transportation and Logistics at GSA. So, I actually have all things planes, trains, automobiles, and hotels. [LAUGHTER] But we do have GSA fleet. We are the required source of supply for the federal government's fleet. We lease about 220,000 vehicles, all types of vehicles. It's really a working fleet. So about 70% light duty, but a lot of trucks and passenger vans. We have started deploying vehicles throughout the fleet. We've got all the EV buses that are going through the National parks right now.

We've got, I think DOT and DOE we are definitely our biggest customers for EVs. So that's fantastic. And we work closely on fleet policy for government. We also have all the buildings.

So, we have an interest in all the federal buildings. So, we have an interesting intersection of the installation of EV charging stations all over the country in federal buildings. And we are starting with those buildings where federal employees are working. And then probably the next phase would be moving out to things like federal courthouses and other GSA managed buildings. But we're doing a lot with the manufacturers right now. We're also doing a lot with utility companies as we start to install charging stations in federal buildings across the country.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Great. Well, thank you to our foreign members who weren't able to join us last time. And welcome again everyone. Now to the more exciting part. I'm just going to cover some ground rules for how the remainder of today will work for our Q&A period. So, for our members who are here, when we get to the Q&A portions of each session, we ask that you just turn your table tent vertically and Gabe or Rachael will call on at that time.

For our members who are joining us virtually, we ask that you raise your hand and we'll be looking at Zoom and we'll try to call on as appropriate as well. For those from the public joining us today, you are muted, but you can chat with the host if you have technical issues or need help. But during the public comment period tomorrow, that's when we'll provide a little more information on how you can participate and provide remarks.

So, for our next session, we're going to be hearing from our leadership and then have time for discussion. When we open it up, as a reminder, you can turn your table tent. And please keep your questions to one or two minutes so that we can be sure to hear from as many people as possible. So now I'll turn it over to Gabe. Thanks.

Gabe Klein, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Great. Thank you. So, we've got both secretaries, I believe, here outside. We're very excited to have them. And I'll just say, I'll be very brief, but without them, we wouldn't have a joint office. We wouldn't be breaking down these silos between energy and transportation. They're like my personal heroes, as well as our bosses.

And I will also just say that this EV working group, we take it very seriously. A ton of planning went into this. It is not window dressing. We really want and need your input and your feedback. And we all take it very seriously. And in the charter, it specifies that these are our co-chairs and we are making recommendations to the secretary, and obviously, to us as well.

So please take that chart seriously, they do. We're really glad that you're here. And of course, we're honored to have them join us in person for 45 minutes. So, with that, shall we invite them in?

Speaker: It's good to me.

Speaker: Five more minutes. All right. Who wants to see me break dance? [LAUGHTER] [INTERPOSING VOICES] I was going to break dance at the Christmas party, but—

Speaker: I was looking for you.

Speaker: The lawyers wouldn't let me come. [LAUGHTER] [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Speaker: But you've got the tie on, man. That's a good look.

Speaker: I do have a tie. Yeah, for those of you that don't know me, this may— You see the tie. Usually, I look like Charles. Thank you. [LAUGHTER]

Speaker: Well, in that case. [LAUGHTER]

Speaker: OK. If I do have to do a little dance, I will say there are quite a bit of— [INAUDIBLE] went into every single one of you that's here. And it was really as much about the people and their personal sort of interest and opinions as it was maybe about your organization. And so, know that. And we really do want to hear from you. So don't be shy.

I wish I could be here tomorrow but turns out there's a ribbon cutting for the first NEVI station tomorrow. So, I will be going to that. Otherwise, I was really excited to actually to do the workshopping with you all. But I'll be here all day today.

Speaker: Where's the first NEVI station?

Speaker: Ohio, isn't it?

Speaker: Yeah, it's in Ohio.

Speaker: It's in Ohio.

Speaker: Announced on Friday. And we're doing the ribbon cutting ceremony tomorrow. And then we'll probably do another one in another state on Friday. So they're starting to really roll in.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: I just came actually from the National Governors Association meeting. We had all 52 states and jurisdictions there. There's a ton of excitement to get this done. And I had states coming up to me afterwards saying, hey, we're going to be mid-January, we're going to be February. Can you send somebody out there? And I was like, ooh, it's too cold. [LAUGHTER]

Speaker: I was going to ask you, I thought Hawaii was the first one.

Speaker: That's what we're hoping. But it looks like Maine is in the mix in January. [LAUGHTER] But I know that Michael Berube, who's remote and from Maine, will be very excited to represent us.
[LAUGHTER]

Dr. Rachael Nealer: And maybe this is a good opportunity to just do a quick reminder because we want to hear from all of you, please keep remarks to one or two minutes.

Speaker: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: And we will relentlessly enforce that on our side so that we're just continuing the conversation, just making sure that everybody is heard, including the great leadership that we have here.

Gabe Klein: And so just to run through it again. So, we're going to allow the principles here and we're going to have Chair Mallory. We're going to have Postmaster DeJoy and Administrator Carnahan here as well. So, they'll be asking questions. Most of this is because of Dr. Nealer. Here wanted to see if I could keep up. [LAUGHTER] My moderating skills were good to do the reverse questioning. But when we asked these questions, yeah, just go like this if you want to answer it. If you don't answer anything the entire time, Dr. Nealer will call on. [LAUGHTER] Any questions on that? All right. I did my dance.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Great. Let's give it a minute. We are ahead of schedule.

Speaker: Just a side note, are those NEVI locations commissioned or what's the ribbon cutting for? Just because they're on electricity?

Speaker: Electrified, operational—

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Plug in a car.

Speaker: I see Andrew Rogers over there. It's going to administrative. We're going to go tomorrow to Ohio. And then there's another unnamed state. And there will hopefully be a third one this month. We'll see. I talked to them too. Yeah.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: We are tracking closely.

Speaker: It's great.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Making sure that we are effectively amplifying [INAUDIBLE].

Speaker: Yeah.

Gabe Klein: That'd be great. We also reminded the states in the NGA meeting this morning that as soon as they reach fully billed out, they can start flexing their funding and build other chargers, other charging where they want it. And it was interesting, it was the infrastructure coordinators mostly. But a lot of their faces lit up. I think people just forget. So some of this stuff's really important. We probably need a couple billion dollars to build out to the minimum standards. And then that's going to leave about 2.5 billion [INAUDIBLE] flex. Yeah. Why don't we have them come in and sit down.

Dr. Rachael nealer: We're going to have them represent– I'm going to introduce them a little while later. We've got the secretaries [INAUDIBLE].

Gabe Klein: Oh. I didn't know. Where are they?

Dr. Rachael nealer: Yes. Yes.

Gabe Klein: All right.

Dr. Rachael nealer: So welcome. Secretary Buttigieg and Secretary Granholm.

Speaker: Yeah. All right. Great to have you all here. Thank you for joining us. I was singing your praises before you came in. I was saying—

Speaker: Who were you singing praises on? [LAUGHTER]

Speaker: Both secretaries. And saying that there would be no Joint Office breaking down silos between energy and transportation and getting all this great feedback without you all. We are very serious about it. And I appreciate that.

And that all these folks, and we have people from the tribes, we have people representing equitable communities, we have MPO, we've got energy regulators, the trucking industry. You name it, we have it. And they really are reporting through us, but to you.

And the charge is for them to educate us and for us to hear from them. And that's how we structured it today, about what's important to you all as we build this reliable equitable National network. So we want to give both secretaries an opportunity to speak for a few minutes and give us your charge, starting with Secretary Buttigieg. And then we'll introduce our other esteemed guests as well after you talk.

Pete Buttigieg, Department of Transportation: Great. Well, thanks Gabe. Welcome to the DOT. We're Really proud to be hosting you and proud to be partnering with the Department of Energy, Secretary Granholm, and all of our partners from across the federal government and across the country on this and. We're especially glad that you're lending your time and your talents to this. EVs remain a hot topic, especially with regard to the decarbonization of transportation where there are some modes, and this is certainly being discussed at the COP talks, like aviation, like Maritime modes where if we work at warp speed on aviation, by the 2050s, there could be forms of propulsion that are completely different.

Meanwhile, on surface transportation, there are technologies that are commercially available in people's homes today that are zero emission. And much depends on how quickly their adoption accelerates. Because transportation is the sector of the US economy generating the most carbon pollution. And so to me that means we should take it as our charge to be the biggest part of the solution. And EVs are at the absolute heart of that.

On one hand, as I find myself trying to remind the public and Congress, I think there's no going back. As the son of the Industrial Midwest who lived in a downtown that was haunted by an auto factory that went quiet in 1963, I know the cost of failing to keep up, failing to innovate. And so does our industry. And so I don't think there's any question of the automotive industry going back. EVs are clearly the future with or without us.

This sometimes raises the question of why we bother to have an EV policy. But what won't happen with or without us are three incredibly important questions. Will it happen quickly enough to help us meet the climate challenge? Will it happen in equitable terms where the savings and benefits of EV ownership and use are felt by those who most need it, including low income, urban populations, rural and tribal Americans.

And third, will it be a made in America EV revolution, which is incredibly important to all of us and certainly to the president. The answer to all of those can be yes, if we do this right. And that's why we're working so hard to make sure that we not only supercharge the adoption of the production of EVs, but make them more affordable to purchase and easier to own, including by deploying EV Chargers around the country.

I'm pleased to report as of, I think, today, or as of this week, the first NEVI-funded EV charger went into service in Ohio. That is the first of thousands and thousands to come. And that's a big part of what's going to get us on the way to the president's 500,000 charger goal by the end of the decade.

We also know that this is something that is new in kind and challenging and will present all kinds of needs for us to stay closely aligned with our stakeholder community to get this right. So whether we're talking about the chargers or any of the other elements of EV production and adoption, this is going to require all of the expertise from every sector of American society. And that's what you are bringing and why we're so proud to host you today and so thankful that you're lending your time to that.

So with that, I have the honor of turning it over to Secretary Granholm. As I do, I just want to remark on the extraordinary insight and energy that she has brought to the leadership of this effort. And for my time, this Joint Office is one of the most remarkable interagency things happening in the administration. And wouldn't be happening without your leadership. So thrilled to be here the helm of energy and welcome to DOT.

Speaker: Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Secretary Buttigieg. We feel the same way. There's a great amount of hybrid vigor associated with two– the combining of the two offices and the great, incredible staff that he brings the incredible staff that [INAUDIBLE] brings. And thank you so much, Gabe, Rachael, and the incredible work of the office to date.

I'm so glad that we have our other partners up here and other arms and branches of the federal government to make sure that we do this right. From users, thank you so much for the commitment of that and all we're doing. I know you'll probably say a word about this, about our fleet, et cetera.

But the inexorable movement of this adoption of EVs is so thrilling. So yes, a million EVs sold this year. I'm sure you're aware of that. Just to put this into context, in 2000, in the year 2000, 1 in 25 vehicles was an EV. And today, it's 1 in 5. And that's only going to continue to improve.

And it'll continue to improve based upon how we do our work here, in this group. So I think it's 1,000 chargers per week are being installed. What do we have, 165,000 at this moment? Actually 166 as of this morning. [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Speaker: As of this morning, which is great. The goal for us and our charge is 500,000. And distributed in an equitable way, as you were saying. Thanks so much for that. So we've been working– trying to work on both the supply side and the demand side of the EV strategy. It's kind of doing everything, everywhere, all at once.

And you're well aware, I'm sure, that the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, the $7,500 for the purchase of an EV, very important. $4,000 for the purchase of a used EV. Very important for larger trucks, et cetera, up to $40,000 of a tax credit. Those are all really important strategies to increase demand on the supply side, making sure that we're building them and we're building them in America.

So for those of you who come from the manufacturing side of things, thank you so much. For those of you who represent the battery side of things, thank you so much. We've got I think $150 billion worth of investment since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan Infrastructure Law in communities all across the country.

And to your point, Secretary Buttigieg, when you come from places where you have seen the hollowing out of communities, right John, the fact that you've got reverse flow of manufacturing in the United States is like, wow. It's amazing. But all of that is in service to getting these cars out. And the cars are not going to get out unless we do our job here. So thank you for your willingness to serve in this regard. So you mentioned that Ohio, I think we're expecting ribbon cuttings in New York and Maine and Vermont and Pennsylvania all very soon.

27 states have issued competitive solicitations. I think you may have gone over this, and 11 more have issued conditional awards. We just got to get them out to all 50 states and territories. We've got we've got some work to do. So next steps. We're interested in where the transition to electric is coming in the hardest to go places, like heavy duty and medium and heavy-duty vehicles. We know there's more work to do. We the battery sizes have to increase.

We know that there's an impact on the grid when you're pulling that much power down. So all of those charges, the grid piece is really important. We know that electrification, we've already got a huge increase in demand projected on the grid, as we electrify everything, it's only going to be more. Therefore, we have work to do in making sure that we've got transmission. And so we're working on that piece.

There's a $10 billion series of grants that we are putting out to upgrade the nation's electric grid to be able to take on all this extra power suck. We are deploying, deploying, deploying clean energy as much as possible because you do not want clean vehicles powered by dirty energy. And so the fact that we have built out this year so far, just on solar, so the Hoover Dam is two gigawatts of power. We've built out 15 Hoover Dams this year in the United States, just on solar. Amazing.

So we're doing all of that because we need to electrify everything, including transportation. So thrilled that you guys will be helping us to answer some of these really hard questions and providing recommendations and making sure we've got the right metrics and we're asking the right questions. So we consider this whole clean energy transition to be private sector led, government enabled. And so that partnership between public and private is incredibly important for the success of this.

So with that, do I lob it back to you, Gabe?

Gabe Klein: Yes.

Speaker: All right. Great. Thank you all so much.

Gabe Klein: Yeah, thanks to both of you for the inspirational comments. And I just want to emphasize, I think what you heard is that we can design this and build it in a win-win-win fashion. And that's absolutely key. I think that's what this administration is all about. It's got to be a win-win-win for everybody. And that's why all of you are here.

Our job is to operationalize that with DOT and DOE teams. And then getting your input on how we do it in such a way so that nobody is left behind in that industry and everybody's concerns are taken–
[COUGH]

Are absolutely important. So that's going to help us frame the next day and a half, but also the next 40 minutes, we're going to have a discussion. And it's going to involve three other esteemed guests. And I'd love to give you a minute each or so to introduce yourself. So administrator, shall we start with Brenda Mallory? Welcome, chair Brenda Mallory.

Brenda Mallory: Yes.

Gabe Klein: Chair Brenda Mallory. Excuse me.

Brenda Mallory, Council on Environmental Quality: Yes, that's fine.

Gabe Klein: And you can introduce yourself. And then we'll move down.

Brenda Mallory: Hi, everyone. It's really a thrill to be here. My name is Brenda Mallory. I'm the chair of the White House council on Environmental Quality.

And we obviously work in great partnership with all of these folks in advancing our sustainability efforts across government and very much ensuring that the work that we're doing collectively with all of you also is done in ways that is equitable. It's a very big theme of ours. So I'm grateful to have a chance to be here.

The president charged the federal agencies through the federal sustainability plan with acquiring 100% of zero-emission vehicles for all light duty vehicles by 2027. And we are on track and I'm proud to say that we are on track. With the actions of the Biden-Harris administration putting forth on this work and saving taxpayer dollars and supporting climate action and creating thousands of jobs, we're delivering cleaner communities for all. And that's a really important part of the work that we're trying to advance.

And you all are such key parts of the work that we're doing because we know it has to be done in partnership. We know that it has to be done in ways that will work on the ground. And I think that groups like this and the efforts that you– contributions that you make are really important for us to be able to achieve that. So with that, I say thank you. I look forward to the discussion over the next hour.

Gabe Klein: Thank you. Thank you. And OK, and not Chair Robin Carnahan, Administrator Robin Carnahan. Can you introduce yourself?

Robin Carnahan, General Services Administration: Sure. I'm Robin Carnahan. I run the General Services Administration. And the reason we're here today is because we have a big fleet of vehicles, like our postmaster. And so we are transitioning that fleet to these. We've made great progress in 2001. 1% of that fleet, about a quarter million vehicles was electric. And this year, it's 18%. So we're making great progress in just a couple of years. And we continue to we plan to continue to do that.

We're also very focused on innovative technologies. We have a thing called the Green Proving Ground. If you all don't know about that in the private sector, you should. You should look it up. It's a way that we can invest in companies that are doing things that create efficiency. We have a big cohort that's going to be coming in, many of those are focused on the EV and the charging infrastructure space.

Obviously, we are trying to use the government's buying power to try to make markets in this. And I think that we've proven to be able to do that successfully. The other role the GSA has in trying to accelerate all of this is through a program called FedRAMP. I don't know if anybody's heard of that in this room, but it is basically the security protocols that anything that is connected to the cloud has to go through to be able to be put into connection with federal buildings and federal facilities.

So that that's our role here. I will say, in terms of acceleration and what we hope to learn from you all is really how we can put the pedal down. What do we need to do? Is it standardization? How do we standardize infrastructure? How do we standardize payment protocols? How do we standardize grid integration? Those are the kinds of things that we can help with that can help you all accelerate this whole transition. So very happy to be here.

Speaker: Great. Thank you so much. And Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy.

Louis Dejoy, U.S. Postal Service: Yeah. Thank you. Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. And I'm proud to represent the 650,000 men and women of the United States Postal Service. We have a workforce that is self-financed organization.

We have– give you a little bit of idea of the scale that we're deploying right now, 31,000 retail centers and 19,000 delivery units across the nation. 400 processing centers. And out of these locations, we load 50,000 trucks a day. We load 200 planes a day and we load 250,000 carrying vehicles each day to deliver several hundred million pieces of mail and packages to 165 million locations across the nation.

So think about that. I'll let you absorb that for a minute. That's the size and scale of the organization. Over the last three years, we have been working to align our service improvements, our sales growth, our network improvements, our network modernization and our cost reduction initiatives because we've been losing billions of dollars for many years. To align all these initiatives to the reduction of our carbon emissions. Because it's there.

For every dollar I spend less, I burn less carbon. And that's the unique thing about our initiative here is how much we can align and measure everything that we're doing. We're excited about what we're going to do in the future. I want to thank the chair, Brenda Mallory, and her team, Andrew Mack and Mark Dowd, along Senior White House advisor, John Podesta, who worked with us.

And they've really tried to get an understanding of our organization, where we are in terms of our condition right now and what we have to do going forward to serve the American public, to save money and to align with the president's goals and your goals for climate– you know, reduction, which has to become our goals right now. So Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker: Thank you. Thanks to all five of you for taking the time to be with us today. It means a lot to us. It's going to be extremely helpful. And I want to point to the Secretary's charge that we've put together.

I'm not going to read it out loud, but there's basically two elements that we want to focus collectively across government, industry, NGO, tribes, we want to get all of this input and we want everybody to try to come together and look out for each other's best interests as well and to learn and understand what those challenges and opportunities are.

And then the other part is to develop goals, metrics, and actionable recommendations for industry and government. And hopefully, we can work collectively to implement those. So with that, this is a little unconventional, but again, I blamed it on Dr. Nealer. [LAUGHTER]

Yeah, no. No, it's really, it's in the spirit of the EV working group that we want to hear from you versus the government talking at you. And so we set this up a little bit differently so that leadership has come– they've thought about challenges and opportunities and developed questions. And they will ask you. And when you want to answer, you can turn your whatever this thing is called—

Speaker: Table tap.

Gabe Klein: Table tap on its side. And then I will call on you. Does that all make sense? I'll start with an easy question. What do you see as– I'm not going to answer it myself– what do you see as the single biggest barrier to EV adoption today? Cost, access, infrastructure, the biggest challenge. Fair?

Speaker: Well, speaking for a lot of the tribal nations, ours is infrastructure. That's the biggest thing, having the ability to build out a sustainable community that can support electric vehicles. Because again, a lot of our reservations are in very remote areas. And a lot of the infrastructure is not built out already.
So we still have several homes that aren't electrified, let alone wondering how we're going to establish an infrastructure for electric vehicles. That is a big thing. And then, of course, just the education and technical assistance side of that is to allow for us to get mechanisms in place so that we can build that grid out. And then also support that grid. So twofold.

I mean, you feel the dreams, you can build it and they'll come. But then what do we do whenever we have to maintain this thing? We don't have anybody certified to work on EV stations. And so those are the areas that we're looking at, is funding for the infrastructure, but also funding to build up the technical assistance and the expertise so that we can put our people to work maintaining the grid once we get it.

Speaker: Great. Thank you for that. Very helpful. And I think, Nadia, were you next?

Nadia Malik, Xcel Energy: Sure. Thank you and honor to be here today, representing the utility industry, all types of utilities. I would say really it's all three. Access, cost, affordability, and infrastructures, as you all said. It's also different in different areas and different jurisdictions. So the cost structures can vary depending on where you are and what an access and the state of the health of the grid varies. But I think what I would say is as we take a big step back with this collective group, it's really essential that we look at the electrification of transportation as one key piece as we electrify everything as you said.

So thinking about how we keep the generation carbon free, the transmission, but also the distribution system. That is the fundamental backbone of being able to have the buildout that we need. And I'll just close with saying to the grid of today, we need to think differently for the future because we're going to have battery storage. The EVs, we joke internally, it's like, it is a battery on wheels. So it's a form of transportation and a battery. So thinking about storage and how things come together. And I will end there.

Speaker: Great. John Bozzella?

John Bozzella, Alliance for Automotive Innovation: Thanks, Gabe. And I just want to start by thanking secretaries and all of you government officials. This conversation is critical. There's just no question about it. Getting not only all of government approach acted on in this format, but bringing private sector and other interests together, absolutely critical. There is a sense of urgency that I feel in this room right now. And from an auto industry perspective, it's welcome. We've invested $125 billion over the last five years in this transformation.

We are out there, committed to an electric future and a future, as you said, Secretary Buttigieg is going to be electric. What are the barriers? If you look at it from the customer and work back, clearly the availability of infrastructure, reliable, affordable, accessible infrastructure. Here's the way you've got to think about EVs.

It has to be no compromise mobility. There can't be any compromises. And so it has to be available, reliable, affordable, accessible. We can get into all of that. I think that's what tomorrow is going to be about. But that's first and foremost. I want to come back to this idea of making them here.

When you think about that, clearly, the biggest barrier is supply chain, the availability of critical minerals, raw materials and components to support American manufacturing comes to the forefront when you think about, as you said, Secretary Granholm, the supply side. And then finally, coming back to the consumer, this has to be affordable. So the availability of infrastructure and supportive supply chains creates the opportunity for affordability.

Gabe Klein: Thanks, John. Kevin.

Speaker: Gabe, thank you. Again, I appreciate everyone for joining our– having us here today. So I think the biggest concern, I represent the UAW and the labor movement. And I know one of our biggest issues right now are folks that I represent in the UAW struggle to even purchase our own current vehicles right now, ICE vehicles, which are obviously priced a lot less than an EV vehicle.

So cost is the biggest factor that I see as an issue. And beyond that is obviously, the infrastructure and charging network. Obviously, having consumer belief that if they do purchase an EV vehicle that EV charging stations are readily available and accessible wherever they may be. So that's where I see it. Thank you.

Gabe Klein: Thank you, Kevin. Doug.

Speaker: One issue I want to raise that I think Barak mentioned earlier is education, knowledge. We're in this room, all of us are to one degree or another, experts when it comes to EVs, relatively speaking. But of the 300 million folks out there, a good portion of which are going to be motorists or are already motorists, they need to know a lot more about EVs. And they need to know a lot more about charging or infrastructure.

We could talk a lot about affordability of the vehicles, affordability and competence, with respect to being able to get those vehicles charged. But I think they need to learn a lot more about EVs. We take a lot for granted. If it were up to me, I'd like to see the government focus some attention on a nationwide campaign of public education.

When they come to our dealers, they're going to get specific education on the vehicles and how to charge them. But it's getting them to the dealerships that I think the government can do a lot more on.

Speaker: Could you just unpack that for a second? What are two or three things people proved to be most surprised about? I'll volunteer one that I've noticed, is many people have no idea that an ordinary wall plug is, in some cases, all the charging infrastructure you need. But one or two or three factual things that you just think people don't know and—

Speaker: Well, range is one. Every customer is different. There's a million vehicles that are sold each year to fleet customers. So let's put them aside. After the fleet customers, you've got your households, your working families. And each one of those families has a different duty cycle, if you will, for the vehicles that they're currently operating or will be operating in the future.
And so each of those vehicles gets sold one at a time. And many of these EVs can work very well for those households. And it's dispelling some of the myths regarding range, regarding the availability of charging. And knowing that for many, many folks, they could charge at home or they can charge nearby is one of the many myths that can be dispelled.

Also yes, they cost more than our fossil fuel vehicles. But at the same time, there is money out there. We all know about the infrastructure and money that's out there. But we also– I think many of the consumers out there have no idea of the tax credits at the federal level, the tax credits the state level and the tax credit, in many cases, from the utilities or the financial assistance from the utilities that can make these vehicles affordable.

Gabe Klein: Great. Thank you for that. Rakesh.

Rakesh Aneja, Daimler Truck North America: Thank you, Gabe. Thank you to the secretaries for providing us this forum to have this critical conversation. I'm Rakesh Aneja. I'm representing our commercial vehicle industry medium and heavy duty vehicles. And as we can all appreciate, tremendous opportunity for decarbonization, representing 7% of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions that are produced. And just wanted to emphasize the unique needs of the commercial vehicle industry.

It's B2B industry, as we know. And we often talk of three factors that are required for decarbonization or the transformation to be successful. And we talk of those three factors as parts of a multiplication equation to drive home the point that each one of them is required to be successful. If any one of them is zero or unsuccessful, like in a multiplication equation, the net result will be zero.

Vehicle products and technology being the first one, infrastructure being the second one and cost of ownership being the third one. As far as the first part is concerned, I think we have initial vehicles available from several of our OEMs today that are excellent fit for several use cases. Triage, regional haul, food/beverage distribution. And certainly, there's a lot more to be done. I'm not suggesting our work is done. We are only getting started.

But these vehicles can do the job. And driver feedback and customer feedback is exceptional. Where we are challenged today is infrastructure. The vehicles are in production. If you order one today, we can have it delivered in three to four months. Infrastructure timelines are easily measured in years compared to months on the vehicle order and delivery side. And last but certainly not the least, cost of ownership.

It is a B2B business. And customers are looking to make money. No one's buying a second truck for their spouse or college going, kid it's really a business tool. And today, these vehicles are two to three times, best case, more expensive than their diesel counterparts.

And last comment I'll make is, this goes back to your comment as well, with this wellness revolution can be made in America led, and that's one way to bring costs down. Localizing and industrializing battery cells and batteries in the United States and scaling up the production will help on the cost side. So it's really infrastructure and cost, the two biggest bottlenecks today.

SPEAKER: Thank you. Now I know we have four more questions, actually five with somebody online. And then we want to allow the secretaries and our other guests to ask some questions. Can people keep their answer to 30 seconds, 20 seconds.

Speaker: 20 seconds.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: You're on. Timer gone.

Charles T. Brown, Equitable Cities: Charles T. Brown with Equitable Cities. Thank you so much for your tremendous leadership. I will say one word, that word is fear. And it's fear because there's a ton of misinformation and disinformation, which is leading people to think that there's a threat on their personal choices and liberties. So I think what we need to do simply is debunk and dispel the myths associated with electric vehicles. Thank you, as to what Doug was saying.

Gabe Klein: Cassie.

Cassie Powers, National Association of State Energy Officials: Thank you for having us and for your leadership. I'm Cassie Powers with NASEO. I represent the state energy offices across the states and territories. It's a pleasure to be here. I will echo that consumer awareness is perhaps the greatest barrier to adoption right now. But one of the key antidotes to that is Infrastructure Investment. And so the NEVI program, the charging and fueling infrastructure grants will go a long ways towards that.

But broadening that, making sure that the grid infrastructure is available, up to date, and can service this incredible increase in load that we're expecting is needed. And next to that then is making sure that there is a policy framework in place to provide market certainty to industry and to actors to make sure that they have the investment needs met.

Gabe Klein: All right. Thank you. Danielle.

Danielle Sass Byrnett, National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners: Sure, Danielle Sass Byrnett with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. So appropriate that I'm sitting here. Thank you all. And building from that, on the grid infrastructure side, affordability is the biggest challenge that we're going to face. And not just affordability about how much it's going to cost to build the grid infrastructure, but what's the impact going to be on low income customers and low and moderate income ratepayers? And how much are we going to ask ratepayers to absorb the lumpiness that we're going to be needing to invest in order to get to the point where this makes sense in a traditional utility structure? But getting over that lumpiness from an affordability and equity perspective is a really big barrier.

Gabe Klein: We're going to do it. We've got Dean and then we've got– is it Henrik?

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Henrik.

Gabe Klein: Henrik.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Online.

Gabe Klein: Online. Go ahead.

Dean Bushey, TravelCeners of America: Thank you very much for hosting us. This is great. Dean Bushey, represent private industry. So the charging infrastructure, the truck stops, the travel centers of America. So CapEx is just one cost, OpEx is really what we're looking at. How are we going to make a profit down the road? We support sustainability. So we don't know what the utilization is going to be. We don't know what the timeline for permitting is going to be.

We're uncertain of when the ramp up is going to be, especially in the medium duty, heavy duty. And we don't know what the cost of electricity is going to be. So from a business perspective, it's really hard to jump ahead and say, this is what the profit is, this is what the cost is, this is what your operating is going to be. We're fully committed from an industry, the uncertainty of what is it going to cost us and how long into the future will be there is challenging.

Speaker: And just so you know, we are working on a big study with the Joint Office on this and the future operating model business models that we hope to be able to share with you in time. We have to get our heads around it ourselves. Henrik. Can you hear us, Henrik?

Henrik Holland, Prologis Mobility: Yeah, I can hear you. Thanks for the opportunity to have this discussion. I'll keep it– I'll keep it short. And I do hear– and I do hear a very loud echo, but I'm going to try and talk through it. My name is Henrik Holland. I'm with Prologis and I represent the industrial real estate industry.

I want to underline and align with the comments that the previous speaker made with respect to uncertainty around business models. To summarize, there's really two key things that we, as an investor in EV charging infrastructure, struggle with. It's the availability of energy from local utilities. And the grid is quickly going to run out of capacity at the distribution level.

We can self-generate. We have the technical ability to do so. But in many jurisdictions, we are limited in our capacity as a private entity, self-generate with solar or linear generation, which is a challenge. Then secondly, customers struggle with EV upfront costs. But they also struggle with total cost of energy delivered. As we're seeing that the capacity charge tariffs in place demand charges, time of use rates are not aligned with EV usage in the commercial space. Thank you.

Gabe Klein: Yep. Great. Thank you, Henrik. Definitely a real issue, state-by-state as well. So, we have about 11 more minutes with the Secretary. I want to give you an opportunity to ask a question or two.
SPEAKER: Yeah, I mean, this is exactly what I was wanting to hear. What do you guys see as the biggest problems that we've got to knock down. So, there's obviously a whole pile of issues that I know you guys are grappling with.

I was intrigued by the notion of doing some sort of counterprogramming about dispelling some of the myths. We have a column on our website called the Malarkey Corner, which is attempting to push back on some of the nonsense, not just on EVs, but on other clean energy things.

But I'm wondering, you guys have such a great program with respect to public information, et cetera, I think that I would love to hear more from you all on the specific of what is the malarkey, you said fear is one, fear because people are afraid of, what, driving an electric vehicle that it'll explode or because the fires? Or are they afraid of costing too much? What are they afraid?

Speaker: They are fear of– the fears that you can control their lives.

Speaker: Meaning that there's a cyber component?

Speaker: Yes, meaning that you would be in control of providing the electricity to control the car. So this whole conversation around autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles. There's this intentional disinformation around it. So that's why there needs to be greater clarity on it. So people feel like government, at some point, can push a button and say, you can no longer move or operate. So that's one of the reasons why it's there.

Speaker: I hadn't heard that. I hadn't heard that.

Speaker: Yeah, I think it's real– I think it's the cyber disinformation.

Speaker: It's the cyber piece.

Speaker: Yeah. There's a lot of scare tactics and fear out there that comes from places like Twitter or WhatsApp or Telegram.

Speaker: Right. Which is really great at telling the wrong story.

Speaker: Yeah, exactly. Are there other pieces of malarkey?

Speaker: Well, I think on this particular– so I'm in the truck– I represent the trucking industry for this group. And it's only about 2,500 medium and heavy electric trucks in operation. But it has really excited the trucking industry, particularly the drivers. I mean we have very close relationships with 50 electric truck drivers, and they love these trucks. I mean, really love.

Speaker: They're quiet, they're comfortable. They're a big golf cart hauling 80,000 pounds of freight. I mean, it is a– I've been in the industry 35 years, it's bigger than I thought. And I thought it was going to be big.

And so I think, actually in medium and heavy trucks, we might actually see the opposite here. As we start to get butts in seats and real experiences of these trucks, I mean, of those 50, probably 5 to 8 of those 50 would be retired and done driving trucks. So I think our driver shortage will be helped with these electric trucks because people want to drive them and people want to keep driving them as they get– as they get older. So I just wanted to respond to that particular point.

Gabe Klein: Laura.

Laura Chase, Intelligent Transportation Society of America: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for your leadership, for having us today. Laura Chase with the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, ITS America. So, we represent the integration of technology into the system. On the malarkey front, I will add that there is a real conversation that happens among some groups who do think that electric vehicles are a way to track them.

And that there is an opportunity for the government to say, you have our-driven your carbon emissions for the day so we're going to make your car no longer run. Right, I mean, these kinds of very misinformed fears, but they're real to the people who hear them and believe them. And I think there's an opportunity, from our perspective, I think there's a huge opportunity here.

We're talking about charging infrastructure and we're talking about a lot of physical components of a system. But there's a digital layer that we have the opportunity to really build out in a safe and secure way that includes the ability to transfer, use and communicate data that includes very strong cybersecurity controls and that includes data privacy. And I think those are elements that need to be addressed as we build the system out among all modes in order to gain public acceptance. Because those fears are real.

Gabe Klein: Thank you. Denise.

Denise Gray, Department of Energy: Just quickly, I think it's also fear of just change. And whether it's going from regular braking systems to automated braking systems that we went through at General Motors and all the other industries, or throttle control from the regular carburetor to the electronic needs. These changes have happened throughout the years. And so I think just the fear of change.

And so one of the ways to do it as we communicate is communicate with regular people. My mom, my kids, the school teacher. And I think the more you get that out that regular people are OK with this, the better and easier it's going to be. You'll always get the naysayers. It's going to happen no matter what. But the counteractive of this, and I think as you look at countries and cities who are embracing these technologies and getting common people talking about their experiences, the better you'll be able to counteract the issue of fear.

Speaker: Can I just jump in on that? Because I think the one thing that I was thinking about when the education point was first raised is the question about who educates? What are the things that it makes sense for us to be trying to– us, the federal government, to be saying versus others?

Because there's a trust factor that we're dealing with. And I always feel like the closer you get to people, real people, the better it is in terms of there having an impact. So maybe this is something that– I like your malarkey? Corner, I didn't know it existed. But a malarkey corner that somehow married with people where the trust exists I think part of that is [INAUDIBLE] if people have thoughts on that, whether it has to be us or whether you see the value in having others speak on the issue.

Gabe Klein: Yeah. So as you're answering, you can answer that too. Mayor Giles?

John Giles, Mayor of Mesa, Arizona: Thank you. I think we're winning hearts and minds when it comes to electric vehicle adoption. I think a lot of us have been using them for a long time. We've been evangelizing for a long time. And we're getting a lot of adaptation across the country.

To me, I think this is a– we're trying to provide leadership here, but at the same time, we're running to the front of a parade that is doing pretty well right now. And so I'm not as concerned about winning people over intellectually on this as I am for some of the more practical concerns, which is cost. I think it's still a huge barrier.

I know that we're making progress on that. But it still is pretty much there's a class society attached to electric vehicle that we need to work on. And I know Secretary Buttigieg mentioned that in his comments. But the other thing that gives me pause is the math still doesn't work.

We talked about the grid capacity. And if we're fast and furious trying to convert the whole country over to doing this, at the same time, seeing that there's a brick wall ahead of us when it comes to grid capacity, particularly, with Secretary Granholm's challenge that we don't power clean vehicles with dirty energy. There's a disconnect there. So I'm an evangelist, but at the same time, I'm wondering, am I doing you a favor by converting you?

Gabe Klein: I want to go to people who haven't spoken. Kofi.

Kofi Wakhisi, Atlanta Regional Comission: Thanks, Gabe. One fear because I heard you would like to hear some specific fears. One specific fear as a consumer who was wanting to purchase an EV for the first time was cost of ownership. How much does the battery cost to replace if I needed to, which because of the range because I did already had, I was already thinking about that question. But could never find the answer. But I took the plunge anyway.

The other fear, I don't know if it's a fear or maybe it's just an unknown is we get this a lot of times, this might belong in the malarkey corner, or it might not, is the impact of the weight of the vehicles on pavement and bridges. And what's our response to folks, naysayers at this moment about that?

Gabe Klein: Great. Joung.

Joung Lee, American Association of Highway Transportation Officials: Joung Lee with AASHTO. We represent the state DOTs. Just a real quick note, I will say that I got a text yesterday morning getting kids ready for school from the Ohio DOT director, Jack Marchbanks at like 7:30. He's so excited about the first EV charging infrastructure deployment there West of Columbus. And just wanted to say that our members are so jazzed because he was disappointed when Hawaii got the first procurement in July. Now he's turned the corner there.

I would say from the practitioners at the state DOTs, there's a real question about the conflict between infrastructure funding, the Highway Trust Fund obviously gets 90% of its revenues from the motor fuel taxes and the transition to EVs and how that can be addressed, obviously, at the federal level, but really mirrors a lot at the state level as well. And so in figuring the big picture kind of outcomes that we're all looking for, I do think that your leadership is so very much appreciated.

Gabe Klein: That's great. I know we're bumping up against time. And I know the secretaries have to be somewhere. So I want to thank everybody, all of these folks for coming and being here and sharing and listening. And I think we heard a few really important things. One is that public perception is really very important. And that there's maybe more that we can be doing on the federal level along with you all.

We don't necessarily need to say all these things ourselves. And that there are real concerns about the grid capacity. It sounds like to serve the DC fast charging, the bulk of the charging in this country will be level 2 and less of a strain, but for the DC fast charging. And that there these ties to the communications part. There's some real myth busting in certain communities that needs to happen. And there's expertise needed in certain communities that may not exist as well.

And so we will– we've heard you on all of that, as well as everything else. We've written it all down. I know that we also have the opportunity at some point to see a real new electric vehicle that hasn't been shown.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: So maybe that's a good segue. We're going to lose the Secretary shortly. So we'd like to take a group photo up here. And then we're going to pass it to the postmaster general to introduce the vehicle that we have out on display. And we'll take a break after that to go see the—

Speaker: The new US post vehicle.

Speaker: Come on. Come on up for the photo. [APPLAUSE] [INDISTINCT CHATTER]

Speaker: I can't– I won't be able to see much of your body if you're on the floor. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
[LAUGHTER]

Speaker: And the legs. [AUDIO OUT]

Speaker: You're being recorded, you know right? [LAUGHTER]

Speaker: Both live and with the really attractive call to public service, which means you get a picture like that. [LAUGHTER] I think they say the camera adds 20 pounds and 20 years. I would agree. [LAUGHTER]
30 pounds?

Shailen Bhatt, Federal Highway Administration: There you go.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: All right. Well, why don't we go ahead and get started. So this, as I mentioned at the top is just an opportunity for us to calibrate as a group on some of the understanding of what's happening in the government, but also the EV market broadly. So we'll have four speakers today.

Shailen, administrator Shailen Bhatt is our Federal Highway Administrator. He's going to give an overview of the Federal Highway programs, the amazing work that we have going on at DOT.

Then we have virtually presenting, Michael Berube, who's our Deputy Assistant Secretary for Sustainable Transportation and Fuels at the Department of Energy. He's going to give us a little bit of information about what Doe is doing, touching on the decarbonization blueprint work that we have going on interagency. But mainly focusing on filling in a few of the gaps that maybe the EV working group members don't know as much about here.

Since we are an EV working group, we want to make sure that we are covering the full gamut of electrification technologies and opportunities. Then we will have Elizabeth Krear, who is Vice President of Electric Vehicle Practice at JD Power. She's going to give us a data heavy, all the information, all the numbers you need to know about the electrification market, how people are feeling about it these days. So really excited to have her here as well.

And then we will finish with Mike Roth, who's the executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. He'll kind of orient us in the medium and heavy duty market and what is happening for NACFE. So I will just go ahead and kick it over to Shailen. We've got a handful of presentations with short Q&A afterwards.

We are pretty tight in this session so I will probably only take a few questions, if folks have, it after the presentations. There's always the opportunity to meet after the end of this session, or we can make sure that you guys have contact information for any follow up questions. Great. Any questions? All right. Shailen.

Shailen Bhatt: Yeah. So I actually know quite a few of you in this room, worked with you over the years. So it's always a great in these jobs to come back and work with people. For those who don't know me, I look forward to getting to know you. In the Bipartisan infrastructure law, $1.2 trillion, $350 billion of that comes through the Federal Highway Administration. $7.5 billion of the $350 is through the NEVI and CFI programs.

And so I get to go around the country a lot, talk to people about how we make this work successfully. I have a TNI hearing tomorrow, which will be just like this. [LAUGHTER] So the ground rules, just a couple of questions. [LAUGHTER] I'm sure it'll be very– a lot of bon ami.

Speaker: Are you ready?

Shailen Bhatt: Yeah, exactly. But we talked about the future of our transportation system. But the secretaries I think do a great job of why we're doing this and reducing GHG and getting down to, it's interesting, I spoke at COP14 in Cancun. And at the time, transportation sector, I think was the second highest source of GHG, the power industry was number one.

Well, power has actually done a great job and the utilities have done a great job of driving that down. And now transportation is the number one sector. But for those of you who aren't truly transportation people, I think it's important to understand some history and some perspective before we talk about the future. If we just go to that one slide with the map.
I think we have a Federal Highway system because then Colonel Eisenhower, he was Lieutenant at the time, tried to go across America in like 1915, 1916. And they were like, how do we get an American military convoy across this country? And it took them weeks. And it was a disaster.

And the map of roads would not have been that extensive. And then he went to Germany during World War two and saw the extensive Audubon system and said, we're going to build one of those. And so one of the questions that I'm sure I'm going to get tomorrow in the hearing is why have you only built one charger in two years? Well, it took us about 40 years to build the interstate system.

From the time the money was appropriated in the 1950s, to full, considered to be full build out. I was just in Phoenix last week and the section of I-10 through was only built in the late 80s, finally completed. And so I think we do need some perspective as we're going out there and talking to people.

Why is this taking so long? I mean, in DC, things need to happen yesterday. But our goal here at the Federal Highway Administration is Congress enacted the law. We have to set the rules by which states and cities and other localities are going to come and be successful in delivering this program, both on the– [COUGH] –side and on the CFI side.

But I would also say when I look at this map, these are our alternative fuel corridors. If you think back in history, if you, in the 1940s or the 1950s, wanted to drive across the country, getting a place to get gas would have been a challenge. That's where AAA came from. This idea of, here's where you stop, here's where you'll get assistance. We wrote regulations in building the interstate system that you had to go every 50 miles and have a rest area.

And that's why you see those beautiful rest areas that are out there. So history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes. And so that's what we're doing now with the rules that we're enacting, is to say, hey– and one of the great things about our interstate system, if you drive from New York to LA, all the signs are the same. The roads are built to the same standard. The exits all look the same.

There's rules around the curves and the superelevation of the curves because we have a National system. We want the same thing for the charging experience when people are driving across the country. And one other piece of history, and this is about the history and about the future. So in 2018 or so, I went to speak in Beijing as the president of ITS America at an event around the Beijing Auto Show.
And there was a government official there, I don't remember exactly what ministry or Department he was from, but he, in his speech, was very clear that China had identified the automotive sector, and in particular, the EV sector as a key target in their next five year and 10 year plans as ones that they were going to dominate. And he kept directing his comments at me. And I think maybe it was a translation thing. ITS America, I think he thought "it's America." And I was like, no, no, no, I'm not America.

[LAUGHTER] I'm with ITS America. I think that was lost in translation. But they were really clear about this. And what I would say to this group is that America won the 20th century, in no small part, because of our infrastructure. And we know this because I think Time, or one of those magazine's, rated our transportation system as one of the key things of the 20th century that really innovated our country and our economy and to the automotive manufacturing. Like America, I live in Michigan now, it's Michigan, right? It's the Motor State, no longer the Motor City. But you know who else is now really excited about automobile manufacturing? The governor in Alabama. Very red state, but very excited about EV manufacturing there. Tennessee, Kansas, I was out there and the governor out there was very excited about the battery manufacturing plant that was going in there.

And so what I would say to this group is that the 21st century is still being written. And just because we won the 20th century on the backs of our infrastructure and our manufacturing is no guarantee that unless we are resolute in the way that we deploy these funds and the way that we go into battle for our economy, globally, that we emerge at the end of this century with people writing the story about how America stayed in that pole position.

And so I appreciate all of the work that you're going to do. At the Federal Highway Administration, we're going to get the NEVI funds out. CFI is coming soon. The reliability accelerator for the chargers that are out there, we're getting that money out.

But everybody is very focused right now on this short game. And EVs have become politicized very quickly. And just for some perspective, the Ford F-150 was not mandated, the Lightning was not mandated by President Biden. It was actually developed mostly in the last administration. And that's OK.
I remember President Trump wanting to convert the GM plant in Lordstown to electric vehicle manufacturing. Nobody thought that was a woke agenda at that time. It just seemed to make good business sense. So what I've tried to do in my role is to depoliticize things that come our way.
It is good for America, for us, to be successful in EV deployment. It is good for America, in red states and blue states, for us to make EV vehicles. That's what the president cares about. That's what secretaries Buttigieg and Granholm care about.

And I look forward to working with all of you from the Federal Highway perspective. And we have division offices in every state. The procurements are going to go through us. But there's a groundbreaking ribbon cutting tomorrow in Ohio that I know Director Marchbanks noted. It is for the first one, but every journey starts with one step.
And there are lots of states that are coming soon after. CFI is going to roll out. And I think we're going to hit the president's goal of 500,000 chargers well before the end of this decade. And at the end of the century, they'll talk about how successful we were, but it's thanks to the work of groups like this. So I'll stop there and see if anybody has any questions, or suggestions on how the Federal Highway Administration can be a better partner. Oh.

Nadia Malik: Nadia.

Speaker: Yes.

Nadia Malik: I remember when you were at CDOT, so Colorado native.

Speaker: Oh, yes.

Nadia Malik: So good to see you. But what I would say to you, I think there's a lot of opportunity and we've been seeing it, but room for further exploration. The utilities and the Federal Highway Administration, the local departments of transportation, I think there's a lot of room to collaborate as we're thinking about capacity and planning. So I want to say I know we've been doing that, but really keep focus there as we're thinking about the build out to be successful.

Shailen Bhatt: That's a great point. So for those of you who don't– I was a Secretary of Transportation in Delaware and in Colorado. And in Delaware, we actually put up chargers on I-95 and US-13 in the hopes that some stray volt might come along in 2011 and need a little light on at the end.

In Colorado, we took our Volkswagen settlement money and worked with Utah and with Nevada to try to get a corridor. It's the first time you're getting $7.5 billion of federal money for this. But before we thought of it just as like a transportation thing, we're using Reggie funds in Delaware. But now you need that close coordination with the utilities because it doesn't do much good to have a charger if the electrons aren't there to charge those vehicles. So that's a great point.

Speaker: We have Crystal.

Crystal Philcox: Hi. Thank you for being here. You mentioned standardization, and Administrator Carnahan also mentioned standardization. As someone who runs a nationwide fleet vehicles all over the country, we're very interested in working more closely with folks who are working on standardization. It will make it a lot easier for us, as we are training drivers to use these vehicles, as we are trying to standardize payments and– [COUGH] –the whole ecosystem there.

And so anything– I appreciate the work currently that's being done and NPRM is out for comment. And anything we can do to support moving forward with you, and standards would be helpful.

Shailen Bhatt: Yeah, and again, just a bit of perspective. Like when I remember as a kid, you could put leaded gasoline in or regular gasoline. Bad things happen if you got mixed up. And you still get stories about people putting diesel into– right? We're just talking about electricity. just you can't make a bad choice here, but you do need to get to standardization. And look, I actually think what has been great is the investment that the federal government has made is driving us towards the center. We'll update our ranks as that migration continues. But I think it's a very positive story.

Speaker: Thank you, Shailen. Good to see you again. You covered just one of my questions or one of my points, the interoperability idea. It's critical, absolutely critical. I want to though think about the infrastructure work you're doing from the customer back. I think it's– and I know we recognize this in the abstract, but it's really important that the stations are reliable and that standards are– and I'm using standards with a small S, not a capital S, that standards of reliability, usefulness, cleanliness, well lit, well– that's critical. Because that sends a signal not only that this is a place to charge the vehicle and it's likely going to work, it sends a signal about safety. But it also sends a signal about the fact that the technology is ready right now and it's here right now.

You know that there's always– there's always going to be some downtime. But that can't be the norm. And so I think as we start to build out this public, private collaboration, that we focus on how the customer is going to think about the infrastructure– the infrastructure and make sure that we're doing that from a customer back.

Shailen Bhatt: Yeah. Well, I just think that there's not a lot of downtime that's a lot. And we're going to be rigorous in monitoring to make sure that we do have the appropriate uptime. But I think about Ray Kroc when he was rolling out McDonald's.

And we want there to be an excellent experience for people. And that's a pretty successful American story. And I feel like we're going to be very aware of the president is– right now, we're talking about the quantity of the charges because we're just throwing them out there, but the quality will quickly follow up. Gabe, do you want—

Gabe Klein: Actually, I think the Ray Kroc example is a great one because they focused on simplicity.

Speaker: Speedy system.

Gabe Klein: Yeah, and that's what we try to do with the minimum standards. We work day in and day out with Joint Office, federal highways, and tried to make it, I want to say simple stupid, but not over-complicated. So that the EVS-Es had to put things on their charging systems that maybe would make them bring down like three modems or big screens.

And there was something else I was going to say. Oh, the ChargeX consortium that we stood up last summer focused on the existing experience 24 month term improving dramatically. We just put out the error document. So getting all the EVS-Es to use the same error codes sounds sort of boring, but man, is that important for figuring out the payment systems in the back end on that.

So I think having 75 companies at the table, there's a ton of learnings that are happening with three National labs. And then that's going to really impact the whole NEVI system that's rolling out. Because yes, we're going to improve the existing system, but also those learnings are going to go into the new system.

Speaker: That's great.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Laura, are you good?

Laura Chase: I'm good.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: We'll close out with Doug.

Speaker: I don't know enough about federal highways role in this idea, but the idea of transparency and pricing. Obviously, you have a lot of control along the corridors and then in NEVI money in. But with respect to the other public charge systems, you can have all the number of apps in the world, but they don't seem to do a very good job on telling the consumer what the price of the electricity is going to be before they get there.

And I don't know if on the gasoline side, if the local weights and measures folks, which play a role in reliability certainly with respect to pumps, there must be somebody that can take charge of this transparency on pricing so that when you get to the EVS and you know what you're going to be paying for and how much it's going to cost.

Shailen Bhatt: That's a great point because I grew up with a father who would drive a long way to save just a few cents on a liter, at that time, of gas. And now I'm a father who, like, zealously plugs in my very sexy Pacific hybrid. But I don't really know what I'm paying. And that is a key point for consumers. So we'll take that feedback and we'll work with Joint Office to try to get that.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Yeah. So actually one of the critical elements of the minimum standards was to at least kind of a foundation of transparent pricing. So while we don't have the operational stations yet, join office and the Federal Highway Administration are working together on a platform, a data platform, to collect a lot of these data and make sure that transparent pricing is available at the charging stations as well. So there's a lot of data elements to the minimum standards that are really important for the convenience and reliability aspects of charging, making sure that we are focusing on the consumer.

Shailen Bhatt: Yeah. And so I'll wrap here, I just I want to note John's comment about Ohio being excited to get out there first. But I think if you look at that map and those AFC's like in a year, in two years, those lines are going to get more solidified. And I just think what we're going to transition to is not wanting to be the state on the map that has it. Because it's pretty clear if you look at the– and again, get out of just the American red state, blue state battle that we have. EVs are clearly the way of the future that people are going.

And I think any state is going to want to be the one that, well, you can't drive your EV here. So I think we're going to have a very positive story. I want to thank all of you for all of your work. And if you have any ideas or questions, feel free to reach out to me. Thank you very much.

Speaker: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]

Dr. Rachael Nealer: OK. We will transition now to Michael, who will be giving his presentation virtually.

Speaker: Good to see you. Thank you.

Michael Berube: Hello. I think we have the echo fixed, which is wonderful. Let's see, I want to make sure you guys– that I can see, do you have slides up?

Dr. Rachael Nealer: We're working on it.

Michael Berube: All right. And I can't quite see the screen. I could have been– there we go. All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. I had a chance to introduce myself in the first meeting, but for those– and I know many of you in the room, for those that I don't know, I'm Michael Berube. I'm the Deputy Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Energy, responsible for the sustainable transportation and fuels work.

That includes helping to co-lead the Joint Office with my colleagues at US DOT, all things batteries and light and heavy duty, but more than that. So Rachael and Gabe asked me to spend a few minutes just talking about the broader transportation decarbonization work that is across the agencies. And then how that plays into where we are here on the on-road pieces we're talking about on EVs. So if you want to go forward a slide.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Hey, Michael. Is there any way you can get a little bit closer to your microphone? You just faded a little bit. We've alerted the IT support to also turn up the volume of the room.

Michael Berube, Department of Energy: Interesting. My microphone in the past has been quite good. Hold on one second.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: OK. We'll turn up the volume in the room.

Gabe Klein: That's good.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: We're good.

Michael Berube: OK. All right. Perfect. Let's see. Can you guys go forward a slide? All right. So it almost goes without saying these days that government is coordinating across agencies. But I want to emphasize this. Back in September of 22, Secretary Buttigieg and Granholm, as well as Administrator Regan and Secretary Fudge from HUD signed an MOU and directed their agencies to begin working immediately in a coordinated way to align an overall government and private sector and stakeholder transportation decarbonization blueprint.

And as that graphic on the bottom shows, four agencies, we all know each other, we work together. But the goal was to make sure that we were all moving smoothly and seamlessly together. This is a knock on government many times. They're not coordinated. And one of our goals was to break that myth and to show we were coordinated and act in one way so we could act quicker and faster and draw upon the power of all the agencies.

Hopefully, all of you have been seeing that live and firsthand. Can you go forward? Next slide. That led to, in January of this year, we rolled out the first US transportation decarbonization blueprint. A detailed plan that laid out pathways to get to net zero across all modes of transportation. And importantly, and the reason I show this picture is it was not just government, but government, industry, stakeholders, coming together. In fact, it might be one or two of you in the room that were in that picture below there.

This was done at TRB. What I want to do is give you guys a quick update of what's been happening in the last 10, 11 months since then. Next slide. So the overall plan that we laid out at that time clearly laid out a goal that it must have complete decarbonization of the full transportation sector. And Shailen talked about every action starts with one step. This was a first step, but important because it wasn't that long ago that people said transportation was too difficult to decarbonize. We couldn't get there.

The technology wasn't there. It'd be too costly. And I think we have shown and are continuing to show that we can get there and actions are actually happening now across every single mode transportation. Today, and in this working group, we're talking really about on road sector. But it's important to note this work is covering the off road sector, Rail, Maritime, aviation and pipelines, which are part of the transportation system. You can click forward.

You have to click forward a few times so they will pop the whole page. So one of the key things that we have said at the very beginning is that hope is not a plan. We can't just hope we're going to get there. If we're going to achieve this and achieve it in the time frame needed, we need to have specific plans. So we set out, as I mentioned, to cover every mode, but to set up realistic and achievable pathways based upon solid innovation and science.

We knew we'd have to be strategic, which includes, in some cases, making choices. Working on everything all the time is not going to be a way that will get us to the endpoint. Now that's obviously a very delicate position because you don't want to make the wrong choices too early. But also making no choices of where to prioritize funds or R&D or deployment won't get us to where we need to be. Third key tenant in the plan was, we said, if we're going to get to net zero, we need to leverage market forces in order to have the wide scale deployment and cost-effective clean transportation technologies.

That's to say, we can't just regulate our way there. We can't just use policies alone. Those will be critical parts. But if we truly want to get to net zero, given the scale of impact, we have to have things that actually have cost effective solutions and again, can leverage market forces to accelerate the deployment. And we have to focus on solutions that can be incrementally deployed that can deliver results now, and clear and significant results by 2030.

So that leads some solutions to not be as favorable as others, if they take too long to get there or can't be incrementally deployed and require too many actors all at the same time to be acting or everything to be effective at once. We go forward. And we have to address full life cycle emissions in everything we do, as well as integration of the grid.

That came up a number of times earlier today as one of the most important aspects people in the committee mentioned. And we fully, fully agree. You go to the next slide. So just to give you one quick snapshot of the document for those that have not had a chance to look at it. We went through, and if you look at this focusing on each row, we looked at every single mode, as I mentioned, light duty, medium-short haul, medium and short haul heavy duty, long haul heavy duty, down through pipelines. And we looked at what would be the technologies that had the potential to get us to the endpoint in the time frame needed?

And while there's a mix of technologies from battery electric, to hydrogen and sustainable liquid fuels, not all technologies when you look at the marketplace, the cost and the timing have equal opportunity. And that's what we really laid out in this pathway. In short, for light duty vehicles, as I think everyone in this room fully appreciate and understand, battery electric vehicles really are the pathway. In the case of medium and heavy-duty vehicles, it's a mix of battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

You go forward to the next slide. So what's our plan? I mentioned that we need to have specific plans to get there. Core to the plan was the investments that are being unlocked in the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. Someone mentioned it earlier, I think John probably mentioned, over $125 billion in EV and batteries by the private sector, additional amounts when you consider the EV charging have been already announced and planned.

That's being driven by a number of those investments and tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Over $100 billion in transportation decarbonization focused federal investments. In particular, ones that focus on EV charging, but also on ports which will include a lot of electrification, just as an example of one other area we may not always think about.

Can we go forward to the next slide? So this is I think the reference of what is– this is one example– US battery investment. Now this chart looked dramatically different two years ago.

But currently when you look at battery cell capacity in North America, there's over 1,200 gigawatt hours that have now been announced and planned. There is for reference there showed what's in Europe, that's on par with in Europe. It is not as much as what is in the PRC, People's Republic of China, for example, although it will be interesting to see how that develops in there.

The map on the right, I think, gets to the point that Shailen was mentioning that this is not just a Michigan or Midwest type of investment, it is truly across the country and in many, many places. For comparison, if you look up at the top right list, how much we would need, for example, to get to 50% of light duty vehicles, 30% of medium and heavy-duty vehicles to be unelectrified. We need on the order of 840 gigawatts. So the current out to 2030 capacity exceeds what we would need by a little bit, out by 2030.

And of course, it would need to continue to grow out as you get towards 2035. But we think this is really critical. The next three or four years will be the defining point. We're already hitting close to 10%, just about 10% on monthly market share for EVs. So we're at that tipping point right now and just entering into it. You go forward to the next slide.

I won't read all these. This is the point, each one of these bullets is a separate and distinct EV tax credit covering vehicles, bioenergy or hydrogen. And there are many. And these are fundamentally game-changing items. When people talk about how will we get there, part of this is over the next four or five years, while we are driving down the cost through both scale and new technology, these tax credits will be critically important to fill that gap, whether it be for EV charging, for batteries, for vehicle production, for investment, for hydrogen production. And we could go on.

Go to the next slide. So what things keep me up at night? What are the things that we believe we need to focus on? The first two costs, that was mentioned before, we need to continue to drive down battery costs and hydrogen costs. We are going full bore on that from a technology and innovation perspective here at the Department of Energy. Certainly, industry is doing significant amounts to ramp up the volume and that will also help drive that down.

We have not missed our battery cost targets now in the 10, 15 years we have been setting them. So I think we feel pretty bullish that we will get there. And importantly, those batteries we are working on are new chemistries. They have much lower critical minerals, which also helps reduce costs, but also helps broaden the number of battery technologies available to the market and address some of the supply chain issues.

The bottom three are ones that I think this working group, in particular, will be wanting to address based on everything you've said. Grid integration absolutely has to be part of what we do. If we do not get grid integration right, we will require far more investment, which means far more cost, which means we won't hit the operating cost savings for businesses or individuals that we need for EVs. So grid integration, meaning smart charge management, the type of policy and rate design things that several people have mentioned are critical.

Supply chain and fundamental resource availability, the fourth item, there is a lot happening right now with the different tax policies that are helping to drive dramatic diversification of the critical minerals supply chain needed for batteries. The battery supply chain end two or three years from now will look dramatically, dramatically different than it does today. There's a lot of commitments being made through the supply chain now to diversify and grow that globally.

But there's a lot of work to be done there. And that is also a key priority for us. And then the last one, the infrastructure gaps, EV and H2, whether it be the building the physical infrastructure, making it truly customer friendly and interoperable and the customer awareness of that infrastructure are the other key gaps. So those are the things that we really see and recognize. Maybe just for the last slide here. So what are we doing over the next year? What are our next steps looking forward?

We are now in the process of developing mode-specific detailed decarbonization plans in collaboration with industry and stakeholders. This FACA is a critical source of input for medium, heavy duty and light duty vehicles. We actually just yesterday, had a kicked off a two-day Maritime stakeholder meeting. So it's happening with each sector.

And we will, over the next six months, be releasing those more detailed mode-specific plans to really help guide, not just what government, but all stakeholders collectively need to do to help hit our goals. A key part of that is developing the metrics. And maybe, if you will, milestones or key performance indicators, how we want to think about it, that help all of us look at are we on track? Are we on track to hit where we need to be, when we need to be?

And it's not to point a finger to say, hey, you're not on track or you're not on track, but so that we collectively, and I love that was part of the Secretary's charge, the statement to work collectively so that we can all say, look, we're falling down collectively on this area. What can we all do together to get there? We will certainly be aligning our agency actions across bill and IRA investments, doing a lot of work to make sure those are coordinated.

The technical R&D works I mentioned, stakeholder engagement. And ultimately, really making sure that we have the scalable, affordable, practical and equitable solutions. So making sure across all four of those areas, when we look at pathways and solutions that are being developed and that we're incentivizing implementing that all of those are hit. So that's what I really want to share. And I think Rachael, you wanted to have a few minutes for question and answer.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Yes. Thank you so much, Michael. I think we have time for maybe one question. You've impressed us all, Michael. [LAUGHTER]

All right. Well, thank you so much, Michael, for joining virtually and for the presentation. And we will invite Elizabeth Krear up.

Elizabeth Krear, J.D. Power: I don't have– I don't have clicker, so I'll just let you know when to change slides. OK. So good afternoon. Today, I'm going to provide you with our latest customer EV data. I'm going to also try to show you some trends. How has the customer been behaving, and where are we heading? And then finally, also share with you some of the top barriers from the customer's point of view, as well as some opportunities.

So next slide, please. Let's begin with the customer. So we survey over 2,000 new vehicle shoppers every single month. And we are gauging their interest in EVs. During the past two years, customers who tell us they are very likely to purchase an EV for their next vehicle purchase has grown 10 percentage points. So it has grown from 20% in 21 to 29% is where it sits today. So that's one out of– three out of every 10 vehicles are very interested in purchasing an EV.

But part and parcel is who's saying they're very unlikely to purchase an EV? And that's on the next slide. What we see here is that very steady trend here, two years ago, 21% said, we will not consider it. And now, 19%. So that has actually degraded a little bit. But everybody else is in the middle. So which way are they going to turn?

So it comes down to, let's look at the trends of, of these vehicle shoppers who are very likely, how many are actually purchasing? And that's the next slide. What we see here is of those 30% who are very likely, one in three actually purchases. Michael said it, the monthly retail share reached an all time high in October, at 9%. And it is held steady for the last two months.

It's currently at 8.9%. But one thing that I do want to point out, even though one out of every 10 vehicles sold is an EV, what I want to point out is that the majority of these vehicles are in the premium segment. So the mainstream market share is only at 2.6%. The rest is premium. So what does this mean for the future of EVs?

Next slide, please. Here, we are looking at the national view of our forecast. And I want to just pause a little bit to talk about this forecast and how we calculate it. First off, it is a bottoms up forecast. And we update it twice a year. There's enough dynamics changing in the system that we do see, it changes very slow and we don't see dramatic changes as we update it, but we do see some changes. What are we looking at?

We are looking at trends within vehicle segments. Who's buying what segments and where are they buying them in the ICE world? And how is that trend translating to the EV world? We're looking at all of the state differences, and it's dramatically different from state to state. The incentives are different, the infrastructure is different. We have an index for infrastructure at the zip code level. We can tell you at the zip code level who has the highest propensity to buy and how is the infrastructure relative to supply and demand, relative to location, relative to speed of charging, relative to how many people have homes versus multi-unit dwellings.

So this forecast is a very intensive bottoms up forecast. And nationally, we have the score by state, but we also have it by segment, but nationally, we are sitting at 9% retail share as forecasted. By the end of next year, we project that we will be at 13%. And at 9%, we're still in that early adopter phase.

At 13% is where we will start to see the early majority. So by the end of next year is where we're going to start to see that early majority. And that's when we're going to work towards that 50% by 2030. So next slide, please. Naturally, this varies from state to state. And this is a heat map of adoption in the country today. This is today's adoption scores.

In California, roughly one out of every two shoppers that has a viable EV option to ICE is confirmed they are purchasing. So again, an example of how California is behaving at this 50% adoption rate already. There was– Shailen had talked a bit about this isn't a red state, blue state thing. This isn't a ZEV state, non-ZEV state. And we're seeing that as well.

When we look at this heat map, half of the top 10 adoption states are red states, half are blue. Half are ZEV states, half are not. We also see states that offer incentives to be more heavily adopted states. And then also states with higher infrastructure scores. So in a nutshell, adoption is higher in states that do have invested in infrastructure, as well as incentives.

Next slide. So why have some of the automakers announced plans to scale back on EVs? EV share of inventory has grown from 1% a year ago to 6% today. But a year ago, new vehicle shoppers struggled to find an EV on dealer lots and they were paying a premium. So having some level of inventory has helped EV adoption. But at 6%, it's still less than the EV retail share of 9%. But please keep in mind, to our dealer advocate friends, that this does not include direct to consumer. So it does not include Tesla.

And now I'd like to shift gears and talk a bit about some of the barriers to adoption. Next slide, please. So these are the top 10 reasons why consumers, vehicle shoppers tell us that they're not ready to adopt. And on the next slide, you can see that two of the 10 have to do with purchase price and cost of ownership, or what we call affordability. So on the next slide, I know this is not new to most everybody in this room. We talked about it a little bit.

But here it is, all on one page. While the overall price of an EV is generally higher than that of an ICE in this, what we call, legacy view, there are significant federal, state, and local incentives that influence or offset that price. Additionally, the operating costs. Gasoline is more expensive than electricity.

Maintenance. Maintenance is also less on an EV. And we do have some repair analytics data. And what we're seeing is that maintenance for an EV compared to ICE is about 55%. So the consumer will save about 45% of maintenance costs. Furthermore, utility companies often offer incentives for charger installations, time of use charging. And finally, residual values.

JD Power also owns ALG. And we do assess the residual values of electric vehicles on an ongoing basis. To date, we're seeing that electric vehicles are holding their residual value. There are some things that will come into play, as Michael mentioned, new battery technologies. So do vehicles become obsolete? The Chevy Volt example is very different kind of battery than where we're heading in the future.

There's also variables of consumers lowering prices. Tesla, a year ago if you bought one, you paid $20,000 more than now. So that's going to affect residual. So we are constantly looking at residual values. There are some things that are going to boost it up and then and then some things that will push it down. So I don't think it's going to change too much in the near term future because we've got these composing initiatives.

But this is very confusing to the customer. A few of you said it, it's confusing. And there's an education component. And it is left now on the hands of, number one, the consumer. And because we're an early adopter phase, consumers tend to be more innovative. They educate themselves. But as we get into the early majority, there's going to be a need to be able to educate the customer and not leave that all up to the hands of the dealer.

So next slide. So when we look at affordability this way, EVs have achieved price parity with ICE. Here on the chart, a score of hundreds of 100 equals price parity with ICE. Tremendous progress made this year, with this inclining affordability score. What drove affordability this year? Well, it's the $7,500 federal tax incentive. And there's that lease.

You can see on the bottom, the bars show the lease mix. Leasing has really increased this year. Why? Because there is that pass through of the credit for a lot of vehicles that wouldn't otherwise qualify, or individuals that wouldn't otherwise qualify. It took a few months for the OEMs to get their ducks in a row to be able to opt to pass that through to the consumer. And then it also took a couple of months for the consumer to understand what that meant to them.

We also saw, as I mentioned, significant price reductions from Tesla, Chevrolet on their Bolt and Bolt EUV, Ford on the Mach-E. So a lot of prices did come down this year. And we saw changes in the price class mix. And this is important. When the F-150 launched, the Lightning, it launched very rich. The average transaction price was about $82,000. But now, the average transaction price is about $68,000.
It's not because Ford necessarily took the pricing down $12,000, it's because they started to offer price classes that are in a bit of a lower range. So we do, even though we're at parity today, can't get too comfortable because affordability is one of those things that is constantly changing. We expect some volatility, especially as Tesla refreshes their vehicles, are they going to come in and back at their old pricing or are they going to stick to their new lower pricing?

Same thing with a lot of the market that is not covered today. The midsize SUV market, very large segment. Full size pickup trucks, not a lot of competition. And truck owners are typically loyal to their brands. As these mainstream vehicles hit the market, will they be coming in at a price that's more comparable to ICE? These tend to be very expensive vehicles to begin with. So we do see affordability changing.

Next slide. Another top four, all these pink squares have to do with infrastructure. The biggest barrier to adoption that's been talked about today quite a bit is infrastructure. Four out of the top 10 reasons. So on the next slide. When we talk about EV owners, that last slide was barriers to adoption, shoppers. This is EV owners. These are our consumers that own an EV.

And the highest level of satisfaction for an EV owner is charging at home. They love waking up to a full charge every morning. It's a wonderful thing. But lack of public charging on the other end of the spectrum, there's a whole bunch of other satisfaction items in between, lack of public charging is the lowest satisfaction among EV owners. A 350-point spread.
Next slide, please. But not all EV owners have the ability to charge at home. Currently again, we're early adopter phase. 87% have single family homes. And of those that do have single family homes, 90% of those owners charge at home. But many owners, that 13% that live in multi unit dwellings, they have to charge in public.

And this is where we need to have a balanced approach between level two charging in the workplace or during dwell times and at the public charging, fast charging stations. And one of the reasons why on this chart, you can see it off to the right, why charging at work is so low compared to charging at a public station is because it's not readily available. Next slide, please.

So going back to those shoppers. Shoppers, the two bars to the right, shoppers who do have access to charging– sorry– that do not have access to charging at home, but do have access to charging at work are 48% more likely to consider purchasing an EV than those who don't have access at home and don't have access at work. So this is a tremendous opportunity.

Next slide, please. Unfortunately, again, this has been the sentiment in the room. We've talked a lot about it, talked a lot about the initiatives that are happening. But unfortunately, even with all of the investment in infrastructure, our infrastructure growth is still falling behind. So we say, how can this be? We're investing billions and billions of dollars in infrastructure. How come that infrastructure score isn't improving? Well, it's because EV park is growing at 2 and 1/2 times the pace of EV charger growth.
I do want to say, what was it, in August, I presented this slide at CAR MBS. And that difference was three times. So that's an indication that there's some progress. In August, EV park was growing three times, and now it's 2 and 1/2. So I think all these initiatives getting up to the 500 is going to have a tremendous effect here. But what's going to be critical is the reliability. Reliability of the fast charging.

And unfortunately, we have not seen– we are fielding– we have not seen an improvement in reliability one out of every five charging attempts is a failure. And I do want to point out that we are fielding public charging feedback from consumers all year round. We get the seasonal effect. We get the new charger effect. We're not seeing– we're not seeing an improvement yet.

If you break out Tesla, Teslas at 96% reliability. So they have—

Speaker: With their own cars.

Elizabeth Krear: With their own cars, exactly. So really anxious to see next year, when we start to see more people leveraging that network, how that's all going to work. But we are tracking it and we will continue to report it. So in summary, next slide, there's a lot of interdependencies and variables that we need to keep a constant pulse on that can all affect EV adoption and this forecast model. However, as momentum builds, it sticks. And 95%– I'm sorry– 91%, it was 90% last year, 91% of EV owners say they are very likely to consider buying an EV again. Any questions?

Dr. Rachael Nealer: I think we have time for maybe one or two questions. Kofi, do you want to go first?

Kofi Wakhisi: Just a quick question on the, I guess that was survey data that you got were the folks were saying where you could calculate the percentage of folks that charge at home?

Elizabeth Krear: Yes. We asked them– we asked them the frequency of where they charge. So we know the frequency of where they charge at home, the frequency of when they charge in public, and then the frequency of when they charge at work. And then we stratify that data based on are they single unit homeowners or multi-unit dwellings.

Kofi Wakhisi: That was all. But I have another question, but not for you, it was for utility industry because trying to figure out exactly how many chargers, for example, are in single family household, or multifamily dwellings would be fantastic. That would be great. But I know the challenges for that.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: So I'm going to try really hard to end us on time, which means we should probably go to Mike. However, I will note, so Michael is actually a member of the working group. So if you have questions for Michael, you can always get a hold of him. Elizabeth is not a member. So if you have questions for her, I would encourage you to try to get your questions to her by the end of the day.

Speaker: OK.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: All right. Mike.

Mike Roeth: Hi. So Rachael called me Friday and said, can you [INAUDIBLE]. [LAUGHTER]

I said, hell yeah. Because we've got some great– it's timely that we're starting this with some work that NACFE been doing. So what I'm going to explain or show is the state of electric trucking in North America, get through the eyes of what we call run on less, Electric DEPOT. So next slide. It's that runonless.com is where you can see all of this in our organization's NACFE.org. But runonless.com, if anything I say or you get excited about something, go there.
Yes, so Run on Less is an effort– so we're 13 years old. In 2017, over every other year in the odd years, we do something called Run on Less. We think is the best of the best in trucking. So it started with diesel long haul trucks. We did regional haul and now we've done two on battery electric trucks.
The first one in 21 was 13 different fleets, all across the country. And they could participate in this run if they had only one electric truck. So there, we were like, are these real? I mean, I was calling them Sasquatches, Bigfoots, you know. That you hear about electric trucks, but they're really not there. So in 21, we kind of confirmed that they are real.

And these are– and what we do with the run is, it's real trucks, real routes, real freight, real drivers. This isn't like engineering demonstrations or anything. This is real boots on the ground. That picture, the third from the right, or the third from the left is DHL in Manhattan with an electric delivery van, for instance.

And they had a small class III kind of vehicle. But what I really want to talk about is what we've done here in 2023. So next. So in electric truck market segmentation, before I get into that, we look at moving goods. And there's more commercial trucks than just moving goods.

Think about garbage trucks and snowplows, but forget about those for a minute, just look at goods movement. We think it's helpful to think about it this way, that small trucks, vans, and step vans moving freight, the ones that are bringing you your packages for Christmas, medium duty box trucks that have a little longer range, more capacity. I'll jump to the bottom, which is what most people think about around class 8 heavy duty trucks, and that's the old Smokey and the Bandit long-haul disparate routes.

Truckers are sleeping at truck stops. They don't know where they're going to be tomorrow. That's a part of heavy-duty trucking, but not all of it. And there's a group ahead of that, or above that, what we call, regional haul return to base that is a very modest part of the market that really isn't talked about a lot. Rakesh mentioned a couple of segments that are electrifying today earlier.

And that would be things like food and beverage and drayage in sort of that short and medium. They go out, but they sit at stores and they go in and they do their deliveries, they come back out. They maybe do 100 miles or less a day. So we define short as 100 miles or less, medium, 300 miles or less. Long return to base is where that truck goes a long way out, maybe drop and hook the trailer, maybe deliver some freight and come all the way back.

So that's maybe 600 miles, which is particularly challenging for EVs as we have them right now. Next. So with Run on Less Electric Depot here in 23, we're not even looking at long haul disparate routes yet. There are no sleeper tractor electric vehicles yet. There are some returned to base generally operated trucks that are doing some long distances. And so I want to get into now what we found with depot.

So next. Yeah, and I just basically said that. There's a bit of a movement from long haul disparate routes to more hub and spoke, return to base. This is good for trucking, it gets drivers home every night instead of sleeping in truck stops. And it also enables some of the electrification because that trucks now coming back to its base.

And for trucks that come back to their base, you can then put– it's just like charging at home or charging at a truck depot. Next. So the 10 facilities, 10 depots, the 10 fleets that we were able to get together and do this year are shown here. Eight of them are in California. So spoiler alert, that's where a lot of this is happening.

Also earlier I said something like 2,500 heavy duty tractors registered in the US, that's a guess on our part. But we do at the end of last year, that was about half of that. And like 1,200, mostly yard tractors, these are tractors that stay on property at warehouses and move and trailers around. And so a really easy, short heavy duty return to base operation. They don't even leave the base.

But California is where a lot of this is happening. So what I want to do now is show a video. Go ahead and get it started. And I want to narrate through a journey across all these ten to give you some insights. Rakesh and I were at one of the sites together. And Patrick, who was here with us earlier, he was at another one. But yeah, here we go. About 6 minutes. Cross your fingers. Yeah, so we had 10 sites.
At those 10 sites, they operate about 850 trucks, of which right now, 291 are electric. So that's a big portion of the current market. And so we went out and visited all of them. We interviewed truck drivers. We interviewed the people maintaining the trucks, operating the trucks, who bought the trucks. We talked to utility operators who were working to deliver the power to them across all of these 10 sites. And 122 on camera interviews to create a bunch of videos, including this one we're not quite watching yet.

But what we– let me jump to the conclusions of what we learned in all this, and that is that depot sites that we call small energy depots. So these are sites with just a few trucks or maybe small trucks that are going short distances. So one of the depots is a Frito-Lay location in Queens. So some of these trucks only go 5 to 10 miles a day and delivering chips and so forth.

Some of them go 20 or 25 miles, but 67 e-transit delivery vans going small distances, it wasn't that difficult for Con Edison to get them the power to be able to charge those trucks. On the other end of the spectrum are a couple of depots, one that Rakesh knows really well. It's actually that site right there in South El Monte, where they've now deployed 92– yep, 92 battery electric eCascadias doing drayage. So they're moving containers to railyards and to warehouses around Southern California.

Here we go. So 10 fleets, 10 depots, 291 electric trucks. A lot of data. I always call the run sort of right brain, left brain. We do all these interviews and that's sort of the left brain. And then we put up a pretty detailed dashboard that is a bunch of detailed data that we found when we were out working with these companies.

So here's Pepsi. This is in Sacramento. This is a Tesla semi location. We tracked three Tesla Semis really closely. And the drivers love these trucks, but it's not so much the Tesla, it's really the electrification, the electric truck and its powertrain. Here's Port of Long Beach with WattEV. This is what their calling Truck-as-a-Service that will ultimately be more of just a charging hub. But right now, they're delivering freight out of it. Actually, with the Uber freight.

We saw our first one megawatt MCS charger there. There's no trucks to charge with it, but they've got the charger and the plug. And that's one of the issues that a lot of these trucks today can only charge like 180 or maybe 360. And so here's OK Produce. This is one– I have a favorite child in this, this is it. These guys are 110 electric trucks hauling fruit and vegetables out of Fresno.

And they're leaning in fast. that's Brady Montoya and the CEO. There's a yard truck right there. If you don't know what they are, they're a– I think maybe by 2030, we won't even be building any diesel yard trucks. UPS, this is one where the environmental, or the emissions can have a real impact for them. They, like a lot of home delivery companies, those trucks go in and they get loaded inside the facility.
So think about 200 of those trucks with diesel today or gasoline going inside that load every day. There they are. If they are now zero emission, what does that mean to the quality of life inside that sorting facility and actually the expense? We told a lot of stories during the run. So we highlighted each location. But we also told some stories.

This is that Schneider intermodal location with 92 trucks. Very interesting here. It used to be that with the diesel trucks, that Rakesh would run it in the morning, I would drive it in the evening, two shift operation. These electric trucks don't have enough range to do that. So what they've incorporated here is a next truck up model. And literally, when I heard Schneider was doing this, I'm like, baloney. There's no way they can continue operations without two or three times as many electric trucks.
But essentially, they're doing it with 92 electric trucks with what they did with 80 or 82 diesels before. Because they can come back to that site and charge. Their radius of operation of those 92 trucks is pretty tight. So they can come back and charge during the day. Driver jumps out of one truck with a 10% state of charge, jumps into another one with 100%.

Here's Purolator in Vancouver. They're going pretty fast on their delivery trucks. Again, you might have saw the charger coming out of the ceiling. That was, I thought, pretty innovative there, where these trucks are big. So if a charger is in the front bumper or on the back of the trailer or back of the truck or whatever, it's a long cable to be working on.

When we talked about standards earlier, I think there's some work maybe to be done there. Some fleets like to back their trucks into parking. Some like to pull in. Some like to be on side. And here's Queens, New York that I mentioned a little bit earlier with the 67 E-transits, but not a lot of miles to drive. Interesting here, they are going from no electric trucks to 100% in a year.

And they had really old trucks. Like, these really dense, urban places where trucks tend to go to die. So you don't want to– as an operator, you can keep using that truck longer and longer if you put it in situations where it doesn't go far from base. It breaks down, you go get it and you bring it back. It's not very far away.

This one is Penske's site in Ontario, California. And Penske buys all kinds of trucks to lease to tons of companies. So the key at their sites is interoperability. So they need to be able to charge a eCascadia, a Volvo BNR, an E-transit, you know, at their sites or at their customer sites. You know, interoperability is really important to them.

And then maybe lastly is Maersk Performance Team with Volvo BNR tractors. Here's another case where they are getting– I call it, they're doing the job of a big hammer with a small hammer, meaning they don't have the range they need, but they're routing their trucks around and getting them back to base to charge, even maybe over a long lunch hour. So it doesn't– you can make these trucks work. You may have to own more, you may have to cost more, et cetera.

But the industry is doing what we do, and that is deliver the goods that we need. Lastly, US Foods. And a number of the other fleets had the same problem that these folks have, and that is it just takes too long to get power to the sites. Even if you're just deploying 10 or 15 trucks, let alone 100 where you need, what, a lot of these utilities are saying is a two-year engineering study and a 7 year, or five to seven years to get the power. So US Foods, UPS, a couple of the others really had trucks coming and no way to charge them.

So they put in temporary chargers here at this US Foods location. OK Produce actually found power on site that they didn't– there were certain areas of the big warehouse that had some capacity that the other places didn't. And we conclude this video with what I want to finish up with. And I kind of said it earlier around truck drivers. This is really engaging the industry.

The 122 interviews we did, I'm going to be blunt here, I mean, trucking industry has been an old white guys business for a long time. And the 122, 49% of the interviews we did were women or people of color. And the passion, commitment of the people working on this in the industry is really impressive to me. And I think the whole industry and is hopeful.

It's not a plan, but it gives me some more confidence. I want to conclude with a couple of things real quick. I talked about the dashboard and the right brain. We instrumented 22– yeah, 22 of the 291 trucks and had a dashboard for 18 days in September. So yeah, if we can go back to the slides.

I want to show you two trucks. It'll be pretty small, but it might give you some information– it might give you some data around this idea of opportunity charging. You're coming back to base to charge or finding charging out on the road.

So the dashboard is pretty detailed, as you'd guess. But let's go to– I want to just show two real quick. So go to the next slide. So this is an E-transit at Penske. This was day two.

And that is a 68-kilowatt hour battery pack. But it did 184 miles. I'm like, oh my gosh, how did it do that? And it was because if you look at that state of charge chart the lower right one in the middle, the state of charge came down over time as the miles went up. But they went back to the site and got a long lunch. Got some charge back up and was able to do more miles.

This was all in pharmaceuticals around Ontario, California. And 54 deliveries that day. And this was just a single shift. Now if we go to the next one, and this is the thing that kind of broke our dashboard almost and the internet was everybody wanted to know what the Tesla Semi could do. So here, I don't have time to go into all the details, but it did do 410 miles on a single charge, fully loaded with beverages. And this truck operated all of the 24 hours.

So we drink a lot of beverages in this country. So there's a lot of warehousing and Pepsi has a lot of places to do this. So they had the warehouses open, they had drivers all day. This was their normal operation. But what it shows is what I call the art of the probable. So this is 750 kilowatt Tesla charging, the Tesla Semi. And so those recharge rates are really fast. They charge know 0 to 90% in a little over an hour. And 0 to 50%, and they cut the truck loose to do another delivery in about 40 minutes.

This is fast charging– this is like a potential view into the future of fast charging battery electric trucks. So 24 hours, 1,076 miles making true, real deliveries. So I'm going to stop there. The next couple of slides are some big findings that we had. Reach out to me or ask me. But basically, the three big findings we had is small energy depots are ready now. Large energy depots, bigger trucks, more trucks, it is tough and it takes a long time to get the infrastructure.

And then our final one is just, in our view, as we look at the future of electric trucking and what challenges do we have, actions to mitigate, and what challenges don't we, getting power to the sites– what we're talking, we're talking a lot, can be– we talk about a lot of demand from the grid and these trucking depots, or truck stops or corridor hubs as we move forward. So we see that as the biggest challenge from the work we've been doing.

Dr. Rachael Nealer: Well, thank you so much, Mike. I am going to press on since we don't have too much time. And I'm dedicated to starting and ending these meetings on time because I know all of you have day jobs. And oftentimes, schedule things around the timing of these. And it might need some wrap-up work at the end of the day. So big thank you to the presenters. [APPLAUSE]

Mike is also a member of the working group. So obviously, if questions pop up, otherwise, Elizabeth is here. Hopefully, she can stay a couple more minutes to answer any questions. A few reminders. We are going to break it up into subcommittees tomorrow. So I sent around the subcommittee assignments, as well as the proposed framework for us to break into those subcommittees. So take a look at that.

I can also send the charge. Now that the charge is known by the EV working group. I can send that around to folks a while just so that you can noodle on it overnight. We will start at 9:00 AM tomorrow.
But a reminder that security, you'll still have to get through. So if you could arrive promptly like you did this morning, everyone did an awesome job, not only getting here on time, but also coming back from the break on time. So I applaud you all for that. And let's make it a twofer for tomorrow. Thank you so much. [APPLAUSE]