Quarterly Meeting for the EV Working Group – FY2024 Q2 (Text Version)

This is a text version of Quarterly Meeting for the EV Working Group – FY2024 Q2 , presented on April 2, 2024.

Rachael Nealer, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Being flexible with that last minute change of the people. You guys should know this. [LAUGHS]

So, I'll pause for a second. But it is a recorded meeting, and it is open to the public. So, we have people from the public registered listening in. So just a reminder.

But thank you again for coming and being flexible on location. We had some circumstances that kicked us out of the room we had booked, which is always a chance that we run. But we were able to get this NREL space relatively quickly and easily.

So big thanks to John, and Sarah, and Julie, and Rachael, and all the folks that in less than a week's time, were able to very quickly pivot to this new location. And thanks for everyone for staying closely tied to the emails and announcements so that you knew where to go. So, really appreciate that.

As a reminder, as you heard from the automated woman, this meeting is being recorded and will be published on the working group page within driveelectric.gov. If you do not wish to have your voice recorded, please do not speak during the meeting. If you do not wish to have your image recorded, please turn off your camera or participate by phone. And if you speak during the call or video connection, you are presumed to consent to recording and use of your voice or image.

So now, that's out of the way. Thank you again for joining us. We're really looking forward to a very dense couple days here trying to get through our first report. I think is one of the top priorities.

And then also hearing back from the subcommittees about what work has happened since the last meeting, and then figuring out as a group how we want to continue those operations with the subcommittees and meeting as a larger group. So, we're still a child in terms of federal advisory committees. And so, we'll all grow up together and figure out how best to operate. With that, I'll pass it to Rachael for some logistics.

Rachael Sack, Volpe: Good morning, everyone. Nice to see you back down there. My name is Rachael Sack. I'm the facilitator with the Volpe Center. The technical questions, I leave to this Rachael. But I'm here to guide us through the next two days.

So, just briefly wanted to go over some safety information, and then we'll let our new members introduce us who haven't yet joined our meetings. So, in case of emergency to exit the building, there are stairs right past the elevators, which will take you down to the first floor so you can exit the building. If you haven't yet found the restrooms, the women's restroom is right before the elevators. The men's restroom is right after.

And then some of you have visited the coffee shop at the bottom of the floor. And we'll give you some instructions for lunch options during our lunch break as well.

So, for our new members, we have three new members joining us since our last meeting in December. So, we wanted to give them a few minutes to tell us a little bit about yourself. If you could share your name, organization, and what you hope to bring to our working group.

We'd like to welcome first Ruth, then Sharky, and then Andy. So, Ruth Gratzke.

Ruth Gratzke: Yes. Yeah, Ruth Gratzke, president and CEO of Siemens Smart Infrastructure in the United States. And what that means is an organization that is heavily engaged in anything from charging infrastructure, AC/DC charging to making power distribution, equipment available to feed these chargers, but also working with utilities on grid connection, and how to do this in a responsible way, and without wrecking the grid in the process. So, very much looking forward to the conversation.

And just because of what I do every day, I hope you see the relevance to everything we will be talking about here. And I'm very pleased to meet some of our customers in the room as well.

[LAUGHS]

Rachael Sack: Thank you. Sharky Laguana.

Sharky Laguana: Hi. Sharky Laguana, president of the American Car Rental Association. I would like to thank you for scheduling this meeting at 9:30 and not 8 a.m. We went from the West Coast getting up at 4 a.m. my time.

We represent 98% of our members or 98% of all rental cars on the road. It's about 2.1 million vehicles right now. We currently have around 100,000 EV vehicles in service. We are, pardon the metaphor, literally where the rubber hits the road in terms of EV adoption with consumers. And we hope to share some of our experiences and our challenges with this group to help further this adoption and hopefully make it a bit smoother.

Rachael Sack: Thank you. Andy Koblenz.

Andy Koblenz: I'm Andy Koblenz. I'm with the National Automobile Dealers Association. Doug Greenhaus was representing the auto dealer community. But Doug retired. Good for him.

And so, I've been asked to come to represent that view. We are very much in the area of trying to get EV adoption up. Our members are the ones who sell with a couple of exceptions. All of the new motor vehicles both medium-duty, and light-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles in the country.
And we have some insights from our members as to what the impediments are to broader EV adoption. And we want to share that. And hopefully, this is a table at which we can try to address some of those impediments so we can get the numbers of adoption up. So, we're really pleased to be here. And thank you very much.

Rachael Sack: Thank you. Yeah. And just a few more quick reminders before we formally open up for welcoming remarks. If you recall in our last meeting, the best way for me to be able to see that you have something to add to the conversation is to turn your name tent vertical. If I can't see it all with obstructed views from water bottles or coffee cups, feel free to just wave me down here. We're a family growing, as Rachael said. So, we'll make it work today.

So, next, I'd like to turn it over for opening remarks from the Joint Office. So, we have Gabe Klein here, our executive director. I'm happy to have you provide some opening remarks, Gabe. I also have some thoughts to share the last meeting.

Gabe Klein, Joint Office: Great. Thank you. I'll be brief. But, on behalf of both the secretaries, thank you all for being here. We are so thankful to have you. And if there's something I—

Andy Koblenz: Don't worry. Don't worry.

Speaker: Yeah.

Andy Koblenz: Do they want to get in or do they want to get out?

Speaker: Yeah.

Gabe Klein: No, we are so thankful to have you all. I also want to thank Rachael Nealer, Dr. Nealer, as I like to call her, for all of her work on this working group and our Deputy DFO Sara Emmons. We need to thank her just for spending a day yesterday on AV issues, which happens, and we're still having a few. But so many people put so much work into this. Rachael Sack, and the whole Volpe team. So, thanks to all of them for all the work behind the scenes as well.

And I was talking to Michael yesterday about just how much has shifted and changed over the last month or two. So much work product has come out from DOT, DOE. Perhaps the most important, the zero-emission freight strategy, which came out about a week and a half ago. And then, of course, we've got the EPA fuel efficiency rules, both light-duty, medium-duty, heavy-duty, which just came out. And I think what you'll notice, all of that is a very pragmatic phased approach, right?

We're not going to get there tomorrow. It's going to take a minute. And so, there's a recognition by the administration that you need to work with industry, listen to industry, be pragmatic and practical. And I would say same thing with EV sales and EV chargers. We're seeing a lot of increases in EVs. We saw, like, a 52% increase last year, PEVs, PHEVs, or PEVs in total. And then chargers, we knew that it was going to take a minute for the public chargers to start coming on.

But we're seeing a tremendous amount of privately funded chargers come online. We're just starting to really see the publicly funded chargers come online. So, I'm excited to be here and to listen to all the recommendations that we have from you all, not because we're checking a box as I said last time, because we really need it. We really need the input and feedback from you all.

So again, thank you all. And I don't know, Michael, if you have anything you'd like to say in addition or if I covered it all.

Michael Berube, Department of Energy: I think you covered well. I'll just add one quick comment. I guess, on the way in today, we're talking about what's the end goal. What's my thought? So, my thought both from the general office, EV side, but also as a member, is that ultimately this is not about a check-the-box factor. There are a lot of people participating in different ones of these and different efforts. And they sometimes can just be something you have to do.

We really, at the end of the day, what I want out of it, personally, in the process is come up with specific recommendations that are actionable and that this group says, this is the recommendation that we need. This needs to happen to make EVs be successful, and this is who needs to do what to make it happen. That second part’s really important. So, give out assignments. We need this, and these are the people that need to do it. Everyone, literally, everyone at the table is involved.

So basically, dividing up the assignments amongst us in a very public way to then—of course, John challenged me year and a half ago, and we issued the zero decarbonization blueprint to say, what are your metrics? How do we keep track that we are on path? How do we know we’re making success? So, what are those things? We got to do it and go off and execute. But Rachael?

Rachael Nealer: Great, thanks. Just to back up, lots of great remarks from the Joint Office leadership broadly. But we had a lot happen at the end of last year and at the beginning of this year. So just as a summary, we had—it was actually the EV Working Group week that we opened the Pennsylvania and Ohio stations. Or sorry, the Ohio and New York stations. But since then, we've opened Pennsylvania, Hawaii, and Maine as well.

So, we're starting to see that progress happening. We have even more RFPs, I think over 35 RFPs out at this point for the NEVI program. But then also since our last meeting, the Federal Highway Administration announced $622 million for the charging, fueling infrastructure program. So, that was the first two years of five years for corridor and EV charging. So now, we're starting to really broaden our scope of work.

So, it's not just the backbone of the EV charging network along the corridors, it's also that community charging that's really going to be needed to support our goal to get to 50% EV sales by 2030. We are now currently, and just looked up the number right now because we're adding EV charging points each day. And we are almost at 174,000 EV charging ports. And that's public and private funding that has gone into installing those locations. We also have awarded $46 million of Joint Office funds to what I like to call the supporting services around the big billions of dollars that are going to deployment.

So, we focused our efforts on filling some of the gaps in resiliency planning, workforce development, equitable charging models, and reliability. So, both testing reliability in the lab and also in the field. And so, we have that funding that was recently awarded, and we're kicking off those projects as well. The reliability accessibility accelerator was also kicked off. That was an oversubscribed program by the Federal Highway Administration to improve our current network by replacing EV chargers that are currently unavailable.

So, just making sure that even though the minimum standards of the EV charging programs is at 97% uptime, we also want to make sure that we're bringing along these other existing assets with us so that the whole network is working reliably. And so, that was $150 million at the discretion of the Secretary of Transportation. It was actually offered as a 100 million. We got so many applications through the Federal Highway Administration that they decided to award one and a half times the amount of funding.

So, I think we're seeing a lot of progress. We also, as Gabe mentioned, the medium- and heavy-duty and light-duty roles from EPA was huge news. So, congratulations to EPA. I think we are all working together as a federal government, but we need this working group in order to have those carrots and sticks to get to full electrification, or I should say full decarbonization, with electrification being a major part of that.

So, thank you so much for your time here. I think we'll dive into the agenda, unless we have any other questions. Great.

Rachael Sack: One quick note for the public who are listening in today. We do have a public comment period for this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon. So, while the public is muted at this time, when we get to that public comment period, and we'll try to give a better estimate of when that will happen.

Once we see how our day is working, at that time, we'll unmute those who have registered or raised their hands to participate. So, that's just a note for the future. Okay, so the first significant item on our agenda today is to talk about the draft report that you all have been reviewing in our huddle collaborative space and making edits, looking at comments, and helping get this to the finish line as the first deliverable from this working group.

So, at this time, we're going to ask each of the three subcommittees to provide an update to the group on your review, your edits and comments. And then we'll figure out as a group how, again, to get it to the final version, so that we can vote tomorrow to be able to send it off. So, our—we're going to go to, I think, the next slide here of our reviewing the draft report. And I will ask each of the subcommittee leads, Mike, John, and Nadia, to give a review. Mike, would you like to start first?

Mike Roeth, North American Council for Freight Efficiency: Yes, our review is going to come from Henrik.

Rachael Sack: Okay.

Mike Roeth: He led the couple of discussions that we had and the modifications that we made to that section. So, he's going to do that.

Henrik Holland, Prologis Mobility: All right. Well, thank you so much, Rachael. I am in the process of opening. I'm almost getting the final out. All right. So, I'll just talk through some of the major—the main comments we made in our section. So, we—there we go. I've got it. So, we—do you want me to just read through the main section or the sub section and pick out the comments or read the entire section? What's the most expedient way to do—

Rachael Sack: I think we can highlight the significant changes if people—we hope you will have gone into huddle or will go into huddle later today in this evening to review everything one final time. But if you want to give about 10 minutes, giving an overview of the significant edits or additions.

Henrik Holland: Okay. All right. So, the purpose of the medium- and heavy-duty subcommittee is to focus on the specific requirements of vehicle classes 6 through 8. That really hasn't changed. We did want to articulate our main objective very clearly. The intent is to focus on those needs and facilitate the transition for, from internal combustion engines to electric propulsion. So, we clarified that section to a degree.

We wanted to ensure, as we move into this section, where it states what we will be focusing on, that we are going to be focusing on industry standardization. And although we believe that the focus on things like software, API standardization is important, we've moved that down a little bit in the list of priorities. What we've moved up in the list of priorities of our focus is our intent to focus on total cost of ownership for medium- and heavy-duty EVs to ensure that we can identify the commercial challenges and opportunities related to the transition, and that will provide recommendations to improve the economics of adoption.

Further change that we have made is that we had some wording in there about advising on regulation. We have more clearly articulated that we're going to be providing recommendations. So, we have—we're proposing to alter that language somewhat. We are clarifying that we are developing a recommendation to ensure alignment between government incentives and infrastructure. Initially, that was utility incentives. So, we've made it a little bit more broad as it comes to who those incentives apply to.

We're identifying early high-volume markets, and we have added a section there that will be considering customer applications and the feasibility of electrification to identify specific infrastructure requirements for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. So, there's an extra emphasis there on customer applications and the actual feasibility of electrification. I mentioned already that we moved API standardization to the back end of that section.

We have added there the purpose of standardization to provide a bit more clarity on what the outcome is that we are driving to and that relates to interoperability of systems, which drives economies of scale and improves data availability in support of, among other things, grid planning. So, that section has become a bit more specific. Furthermore, we have created a separate section here on our work on identifying gaps in workforce needs to support the transition to medium- and heavy-duty EVs, and we will be developing recommendations to address those gaps.

So, we've pulled that out and made that more specific. And then finally, we have pulled this to the back end of the objective section. We will address hydrogen fuel cell EVs as a complimentary priority due to the commonality of electric drivetrain components and opportunities to address issues that might exist with the EVs in terms of weight range and recharging times. We're proposing a few changes to the following actions sections.

We are going to define, as a next step priorities in the sequencing of activities, and we're proposing to add a next step which involves the creation of an inventory and a baseline of existing medium- and heavy-duty standards and regulation relevant to the objectives of the subcommittee. And that was in alignment with some of the work that we saw being proposed by the other two subcommittees. We're going to commence with the TCO analysis and requirements definition for medium- and heavy-duty EVs, that hasn't really changed very much, and establish position statements on the hydrogen fuel cell EVs.

A last addition that we're proposing is to ensure that we coordinate very closely with the other two subcommittees. As reading through the report, you can see that there are quite a few interface sections between the subcommittees.

Rachael Nealer: Great.

Henrik Holland: Thank you.

Rachael Nealer: Thank you so much for that summary, Henrik. Do we have questions from folks? Yes?

Speaker: I'm sorry, can I just ask? You mentioned a baseline or a summary of standards related to heavy-duty. Is that right?

Henrik Holland: That's correct, yeah. An inventory and baseline of existing standards and the regulation relevant to this particular series of vehicle classes.

Speaker: Got it. Does that include both federal and state regulations?

Henrik Holland: I would believe so, yeah.

Speaker: Okay, thank you.

Rachael Nealer: Michael?

Michael Berube: Just to me, a little bit of a process. So, looking at the document in the huddle space, it looks like there's two medium heavy-duty electrification subcommittees. There's like a section and another.

Henrik Holland: Yeah.

Michael Berube: What's the—

Henrik Holland: I can clarify that. What we did, we provided comments into the document as a committee. And then last Thursday, we came together to work through those comments. And based on that, we cleaned up that section. Instead of then going into the original section and making all the changes there, which was becoming too messy, Rachael aligned on the fact that I would just copy and paste the entire new section into the report. So, all the changes are visible, but it reads a little cleaner.

Michael Berube: Got it. So, just basically look at the one, that's the second one.

Henrik Holland: The second one, yeah.

Michael Berube: The first one, we can ignore everything about it.

Henrik Holland: Yes. Yes, the second one is the clean version.

Michael Berube: Got it, Okay.

Rachael Sack: The one dated one 1-30-24. Yep.

Henrik Holland: That's right.

Michael Berube: Yeah, the file, you mean, yes. Yep. Okay, I know I was looking—I had a question when I read through these yesterday, but now I can't quite find it. And I'll go back and reread and look.

Rachael Sack: Any other questions for Hendrik for the subcommittee?

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, maybe just a little bit of expectation setting. So, this is the first time we're going through a report. While we drafted the report through the team here, the Bowlby team and myself and Sara, we want the EV Working Group to feel full ownership of this document. And it was suggested by our legal counsel that the EV Working Group members were the ones to actually resolve the comments. And so, that's why we passed it to the subcommittee members.

So, I will say I think you guys did a great job of proposing some new text, but I think the goal is to try to not let perfect be the enemy of good here. And we want to get this document out. We do have a legislative deadline for the first report. I think we have a little bit of flexibility within that window. But the goal here is to try to finalize the report. So, I would ask please review this section. And really, I think what we're trying to identify is major concerns or things that need to be added to the report in order to have consensus.

So, the vote tomorrow will look like a majority vote to pass this report as the first report. There is the ability, if there are some folks that really disagree with it. I'm hoping not because we're just kind of priority setting here. So, I would rather be more inclusive about what goes in the document than to be too strict about things. But there is the ability to write a minority report that says, I disagree for these reasons. And a small—whether it's a single person or a small group of folks that wanted to write a minority report would be able to do that.

But the goal is to try to get this approved by the majority of the working group members. So, please review those sections, Henrik. Thank you for that summary. And we will continue to finalize this throughout the day. We have some time later today, too, that if we don't address all the comments that are needed to have really the discussion that is needed, we can talk about those some more later in the day. Andy?

Andy Koblenz: Yeah, so I think this is very well done. I commend you on it. I just want to highlight one thing. I really like the inclusion of the total cost of ownership as your starting point. And I just would encourage the subcommittee to be very broad in what constitutes a cost, so that it's in the medium-duty commercial space, downtime is obviously, trucks not producing, is not working.

It may take a loss as we go through the availability of charging in particular, that as I said or have a broad, not just how much the energy cost to get it out, but also the real—it's in here. It says challenges and opportunities, commercial challenges and opportunities. So, a broad concept of total cost of ownership is—that's what is going to drive the commercial space, drive the Adobe.

Henrik Holland: Yeah, it makes sense.

Rachael Sack: Any other comments or questions on this topic? Great, thank you very much. As Rachael mentioned—yes?

Rachael Nealer: Can I just add one more thing? At the end of the day today, we also have a public comment period. We scheduled that intentionally between this discussion and the vote so that we can hear from the public if there's anything that they think that we're missing that we want to build in. So, please know that is part of the process as well.

Speaker: But does the public have then the documents?

Rachael Nealer: They do not have the document, but they are listening to the meeting.

Speaker: Yes.

Rachael Sack: Okay, let's move on to our next subcommittee, the charging network. John?

John Bozzella, Alliance for Automotive Innovation: Okay, thank you. And first of all, thanks to Nadia for letting me commandeer her iPad so I can be in huddle. I can be in her—

Rachael Sack: John, I just sent you the link.

John Bozzella: Yes, thank you. It's all good. It's all good. It's perfect.

Speaker: We're collaborating.

John Bozzella: We're already collaborating. So, this is perfect. I'm going to save some of my comments for the subcommittee report outs. But specifically with regard to edits, first of all, I want to commend the original scribes and authors for getting, I think, a very, very good general summary of where we left. So, in terms of our work, our continuing discussions are pretty consistent with where you started. I want to pick up where Gabe and Mike left off.

I do think it's important to recognize that as a—and I think, Rachael, you mentioned carrots and sticks, to recognize the enormity of the work that has been done by EPA and DOE and DOT with regard to the—I'll speak just for the light-duty side, the light-duty regulatory pathway between now and 2032. I do think pragmatic is a word that could be used to describe it. I also think transformational and challenging can be used to describe it.

And the reason I say that is that, from a regulated industry perspective, we're committed to moving forward. And what we're finding, and I think Andy and Sharky can certainly build on this from a customer perspective, what we're finding is the number one barrier is charging, right, both the perception and the reality. So, two questions we get at the point of sale. How far, how far does this thing go on a charge, and where do I charge it?

The studies we've done, the research we've done indicates the incredible importance of public charging, not only for actual movement from point A to point B but the perception that the technology is ready. And therefore, it's an important market readiness exercise. And so, the subcommittee recognizes this, and I think we had a good series of discussions. Let me just emphasize a couple of things here.

One is the metrics really are important, and you know, Michael referenced those. And I think that—and I'm a broken record on this because I said it at the first EV Working Group thing. I think as a matter for the entire EV Working Group, we should recognize the importance of understanding how we measure any gaps between our aspiration and the reality in the marketplace. We absolutely have to be honest and open and transparent with each other about where those are if they exist because that's the magic of this group.

And I think—so we have that, and you can see this if you're looking in Huddle. You can see that defining metrics, including affordability, reliability, accessibility, and sustainability, is sort of the number one item that the subcommittee identified to tackle. We've also referenced the idea of minimum standards, which obviously the Joint Office is already doing an excellent job on. How many of you are EV drivers? So, I can guarantee you, all of you have had a negative experience at a charging station.

I guarantee it. You just have, right? And so, this might involve imperfect. [LAUGHS] Perfect. So, by the way, fortunately, they are decreasing, at least in my experience. So, the work, the continuing work to build those minimum standards and communicating them with the public is really important. And that was a good sort of discussion in our first two subcommittee meetings. How do we communicate to the public that this work is being done?

We talked about workforce baselines, which you can see in the document, as well as making sure that we establish a public planning baseline with regard to zoning regulations and building codes. A lot of this work is going to happen at the local level. And in terms of our experience with our automaker members who are working to get charging infrastructure on the ground, we do see some barriers with regard to local zoning and standards. And so, I think that's a really, really—or building codes, and I think that's a really excellent priority that the subcommittee identified.

For those of you who are in the Huddle, Michael made a comment yesterday that I think is really important and that we should take on, and that is to broaden the context with regard to how we're talking about charging and how we're thinking about charging both, when we talk about home charging because not everybody lives in a single family home with a garage where you can put a level 2 charger, right? And so, multiple dwelling units, charging times, street access, those types of things I do think need to be built into this in the initial draft.

And I think—am I reflecting your point of view on this? I agree with that, and I would guess based on our conversations in the subcommittee that they would as well. And that's kind of the quick summary.

Rachael Sack: Great. Any comments or questions?

Speaker: John, that was so very well said. Thank you. I'll just add one comment on behalf of our industry, which is we've observed that chargers need to be where consumers are the destination. It could be a multi-unit apartment building, like John mentioned. It could be in a park, an amusement park, a national park. Certainly, at airports, there's a tremendous need. There's 14,000 cars in the LAX, rental facility there.

So, the charging facilities, today, the grid has been concentrated on interstate travel. And we just want to raise our hand and say we also need to be thinking about where consumers are going because that's actually the most convenient place for them to charge.

Speaker: Can I steal your—I hope I don't dominate the conversation. I want to agree with John on the centrality of charging EV. What are the impediments to adoption, and how do we get rid of the impediments? And the lack of satisfaction and understanding of charging is the number one impediment that's where we hear from our members. We surveyed them on this. And so, I want to underscore that.

But in connection with that, I think there was a cross-cutting concept that needs—that I hope we can add to the report or add at least to the discussions, which is the notion of consumer education, particularly on the non-commercial side. On commercial side, it's going to take care of itself. As I said, you know, vehicles are tools, and whether they work from an economic perspective is clear.

On the consumer side, not so much. And so, underlying this is we need to help the public understand better how everything works, where it is, how reliable, all those kinds of questions. So, perhaps we can add a sentence or two in the report somewhere that we need to focus on consumer education. It cuts across a lot of things.

Speaker: And to add one comment to that, overall, just reflecting on myself, and we just had this past week before the meeting. I'm at the point of not buying an EV right now because of the cost and complexity of upgrading my home and because of the ease of use or the lack of use. I think these are maybe other themes to weave into this, the affordability, the practicality of things, but then also the need for standardization to drive visibility to the availability of chargers.

Because that's the reason why people don't drive up or why people don't convert, right? If I'm on a road trip, is that charger ready? How long is it going to take? Can I reserve a space? And we'll never get there if there's not at least a minimum standard that drives operators to contributing to this visibility into charging.

John Bozzella: Yeah. Can I just—can I just very quickly respond to this? Very, very true, and it's a very good comment. I just want to reference that in some of the paragraphs before the priorities that we outlined, one of the things we do talk about is the need to make sure that the network is future-proofed, that we're thinking about not only demand is where it is today and charging times where they are today but where they need to be.

Speaker: Okay.

John Bozzella: Because I think there's potentially always going to be a gap between a customer's expectations about charging time and charging availability and where we are, unless we continue to drive the system to be a little bit ahead of where the customer is.

Rachael Sack: Okay, a few comments, questions. We'll start with Rakesh, and Cassie, and Mark.

Rakesh Aneja, Daimler Truck North America: Yeah, thank you. Great comments and discussion. I agree with all of the points. I just wanted to emphasize the charging time and duration topic, specifically for commercial vehicles. I think we are at a point where it can be a pivotal sort of direction overall in the decarbonization journey, the opportunity that we have with really high charging power, so megawatt-type charging. So that commercial vehicles can go about their business and minimize the downtime, and that affects total cost of ownership and other things.

And for the type of loads that we're talking about and the battery capacity, that's a significant demand as well. Few commercial vehicles looking to draw power and high rate at the same time. That's equivalent of a small city load. So that requires explicit attention from a commercial vehicle perspective, and I just wanted to comment that.

Rachael Sack: Cassie?

Cassie Powers, National Association of State Energy Officials: Yes. Agree with all of the recommendations that have come out of the subcommittee. I would also just add that we've heard concerns around the business proposition for charging stations. And it's not only the affordability to charge at station, but can the site hosts actually afford to keep these stations, in particular, after federal funding has gone away? So, that might be something to consider, and the return on investment in particular.

There's a question that keeps on popping up in what can be done for recommending energy control would be a working solution.

Speaker: Great comment.

Rachael Sack: Thank you. Mark?

Mark Dowd, Council on Environmental Quality: So, John, just to clarify, in your subcommittee, did you—are you prioritizing or making any recommendations with regard to multifamily or multi-tenant housing?

John Bozzella: We recognize this as an issue. I don't know that we—and I'm open to it. I don't know that we prioritize that over, say, single-family home charging or public charging, one of the things—and we'll talk about this when we do the subcommittee discussion report outs. One of the things we felt like we needed to see was sort of imagine a map, an active sort of map that shows where charging is and where we think it's going based on private sector investment, based on NEVI, and those types of things, to better understand where the gaps are.

Because I think from a subcommittee perspective, we're not quite sure where the gaps are. Because when we look at them, the gaps are everywhere. Like, there just isn't enough charging. You could argue, hey, look, 80% of light-duty customers are charging at home. But they're 10% of the market, right? So, I think what we need is sort of a better view about where we are and where investments' driving, say, in the near term, which I would define as the next year to three years to be able to assess where the committee and where the investments need to be focused. What's your view on this?

Mark Dowd: I think the challenge is—charging from home is a viable option. The significant incline on the challenge for—and one potential recommendation could be for discretionary funding that is currently available. And I don't know whether that's a bridge too far. I'm looking at that at you, Gabe. Is that bridge too far to make that an initial recommendation to pay some discretionary funding? And to John's point, whether it's study, which I hate to a good degree, or actual funding or a combination of all of it.
Because I think that where the part of the population is going to be challenged, but it is a viable market for your members.

John Bozzella: Good point.

Rachael Sack: Mark, you keep spinning yours up and down, I think. Would you like to give a comment on that?

Speaker: Yeah, I'll go real quick. I'll foot-stomp on the different types of consumers we need to consider. So, I think we've captured—I don't know if we've completely captured the early adopters. Those that can afford to install EV charging at their home, who might be able to install or to buy the higher purchase price and get the vehicle they want, they want chargers out in the road. They want to take a road trip. That's the type of consumer, really, we've captured at the beginning as we were discussing before the meeting started.

It's got to be convenient for the next group. How are we going to encourage or enable the next group of consumers who maybe live in a multi-dwelling unit, as you mentioned, or who can't afford the more expensive cars or who have different worries about being convenient. Getting out on the road, what happens when I run out of charge? So, let's always keep the consumer in mind, that next tranche of consumers, which is super important. How do we capture that?

Rachael Sack: Michael and Nadia?

Michael Berube: I was just going to say, I think relative to the document itself, John, if you look at—might be able to lift more or less of that little paragraph. I put it in there, but it got marked. Multi-unit dwelling and we've used a term—do we have Eric present at the first meeting? Eric Wood? No? Okay. No home charging, kind of people that don't have charging, long-dwell time charging, so whether it be multi-unit dwelling or curbside, and solutions for those folks.

I'll just also reference, if for the charging group, if they would like, there is a really good study and resource through NREL that looks specifically at this question and quantifies them and does make an attempt at looking at over time. When will those people be hitting charging? Now, it's an attempt. It's a little hard to say. I'll have one perspective of this idea of charging visibility, and Andy, you mentioned about education.

People seeing a charger someplace that doesn't have an electric vehicle but is, seeing one is a very big form of education in a way. And being able to talk about building out ahead of demand a little bit, okay, well, the multi-unit dwelling, that's going to be a problem for the future. But if you're building out, it is a long proposition. So, you can get to start early. And it's a huge advertising for all those people to see those charging. Oh, I guess there's chargers available. Maybe next time I look for a car, I'll get EV.

Rachael Sack: Nadia, and then we'll move on to the next.

Nadia El Mallakh, Utility and Clean Energy Sectors: So, this will blend into the next group. So, we'll be good. Mark, Michael, a couple of things in the grid integration subcommittee, we did talk specifically a couple of meetings ago about multi-dwelling units and locations that don't have a home charger. So, we had talked about attempting to prioritize that. On the discretionary funding, I would just note, from real-life experience, it's easiest if, quote, "new projects, new condominiums, apartments, et cetera, townhomes,” are built to have some form of readiness.

But the challenge comes in retrofitting existing buildings. And having actually experienced retrofitting buildings that are historic designation, and the permitting and the processes, also capturing the grid, potentially any discretionary funding, capturing grid side costs because that can be very expensive and sometimes can be a make-or-break for the project. So, just noting that there. And so, with that, I will jump into—

Rachael Sack: Oh, one other comment, sorry, that I missed. Would you like to comment?

Speaker: Thank you. This is not an original thought. I just want to underline what's been said about the multifamily problem. The reality right now is that we're doing the opposite of future-proofing. I can tell you in local city council meetings right now, we're approving multiple—mix of multifamily units. As the price of housing goes up and the price of electric vehicles goes down, the irony is we're approving more and more multifamily units with less and less electric vehicle charging.

I mean, it's not unusual in my community to see 300, 400-unit apartment buildings going up with three or four charging stations. And that's just a scheduled train wreck. So, I think it's important that part of this document, we include some proposed model building codes and licensing and permitting codes. And then that the bigger problem, though, is we can impose those limits on development, like having the actual capacity to get the electricity in not just some PVC in a parking lot, but the electric infrastructure to back up those units is bigger challenge.

Speaker: Yeah, just before Nadia goes, and I'm sure you'll cover this. But there is a coalition of organizations, many of whom are represented in this working group that have been working on building code legislation at the state and local level. And I think you make a great point that it should be referenced in this report in either section or maybe right up front. The need to have these because I think you're exactly right, the retrofitting thing is ridiculous.

Speaker: Something I think that would be enormous value, too, if a local government could click on a tool kit and say, here's—not the bible, but here's some suggestions that have worked in California and in Europe and other places that have met this challenge successfully already, that would be very helpful.

John Bozzella: Rachael, a process question. Is there someone capturing items for specific park on things to provide maybe, because they keep coming up of—

Rachael Nealer: Yep, so I see John taking notes. I also have started just a note in the charging network subcommittee section, John. Sounds like there's a number of things that we might want to integrate based on this conversation. So, cross-check your notes with my notes. And we can talk about the timing to do that. I mean, obviously, this document has a lot of redline right now. So, I think we're going to have to do some probably administrative cleanup, but also want to make sure that we're working in the comments that we're discussing here today.

So, maybe when we get towards the end of the day, we can talk about the timeline on how to accomplish that, either with the time that we have here today or over break.

John Bozzella: And resizing a little, that's not the talk but kind of more of the parking lot thing. So, when something comes up and there's a—we don't have a long discussion now, like, for example building codes. One of the things to put—if someone has this parking lot, we could circulate, there is actually a model building code update on EV charging that is in process. And we can circulate just to this group what it is and where it's now.

Rachael Nealer: Yep.

John Bozzella: Have a follow up. Maybe we just haven't got parking or just maybe a parking lot to-do list.

Rachael Nealer: Yep, we can do a visual one if you would prefer, but we also have people taking notes.

John Bozzella: Okay, so if the note-takers put that one in the parking lot to provide that, as well as the no-home charging reports.

Rachael Nealer: Sounds good. Okay, Nadia, now, let's move over to the grid integration subcommittee.

Nadia El Mallakh: All right. Well, we've touched on a lot of the topics, but I'll highlight some of the comments. So just as a reminder, grid integration is defined as ensuring the sustainable integration of EVs into the electric grid. So, as a subcommittee, we spend a lot of time focusing on what does sustainable mean because we thought it was a great word and all-encompassing. So, great job by the team of framing that up. So, let me get to the comments. And I'll just hit on a little more background in context before I jump into the comments.

So, how we define sustainability is really in the second full paragraph. In paragraph, we have four areas, grid readiness. The second is—you can probably see that right there. The second is comprehensive planning. Because just like all industries, from a utility grid perspective, electrification of transportation is critical, but we have things like data centers coming. We have overall resource planning, we are making long-term planning investments as you're looking to progress your system towards more carbon-free generation sources.

Also, some utilities are dual fuel. You have a gas system and an electric. So, those things all come to play. So, comprehensive planning. Danielle, I know you were a big proponent of that, which is great. It is obviously often a regulatory requirement. Transparency and education was our third definition of tackling what's going to be sustainable. And then the fourth is partnerships, where I think this working group represents a lot of that. But we're going to need really all hands on deck.

So, with that, we added some crosscutting. We added our own crosscuts that really focused on affordability, speed, and data. Because we feel like anything that's grid readiness, we're talking about grid integration, you're going to be thinking about those three areas. With that said, you'll see here some of the comments. I'm up in the first paragraph. Michael, appreciate your edits and additional comments.
So, we did—Michael, you moved up affordability. That's one topic that has been front and center in our subcommittee and also just in general in the utility regulatory world. At the end of the day, most of you, if not all of you, are utility customers of some type of utility. And your bill impacts, rates, those things are very important, and the regulators of course care about that. So, we're thinking about affordability and security.

I noticed the call out of cybersecurity, Michael. So yes, absolutely, that's front and center. And you peppered in how we're managing the transition with all these bigger landscape items, like generation, grid planning, other load that's coming on, like, i.e., artificial intelligence, data centers, et cetera. So, those were good edits. I don't think anyone will have issues with those. There may be some wordsmithing, but I think those all looked good.

The second paragraph, Michael, you added some comments about, when we first started talking about transparency and education, going back to our meeting in December, we realized even some basic, and mayor, we've talked about this, some very basic questions. I mean, we have a lot of folks who've never touched a—driven an EV, been in an EV. The charger, some basic education. But Michael, I think you added on, even inside industries, like, for example—and their regulators, do all utility regulators.

That could be a public utility commission. That could be a city council. Depending on the type, that could be a board, if it's a co-op. So, you've got all these different structures. So, I think you were trying to get to the point that we need basically 101 education to many stakeholders.

Michael Berube: Right, both ways. Both sides of this equation don't quite understand the other side as well as they need to.

Nadia El Mallakh: Right, so kind of comprehensive education. And I took that comment to mean, let's be a little bit broader in how we're framing that. And let's see. We talked about partnerships can require coordination. You added that. So, I'm jumping down to, I think, what is the third full paragraph. Let's see here. The only thing I would say on this, Michael, I noticed good adds-on, we have to address all needs and end consumers. We might just call that customers.

Michael Berube: Yep.

Nadia El Mallakh: Like ratepayers, we try to—you all know what that is, but the average person may not know what that is. So, we might just say customers. But good comments there. It's on affordability, we love that. And I think those were the main comments in our section. If I missed anything or others have additional notes for context, feel free, especially our subcommittee, to jump in, or anyone, quite frankly.

Speaker: Yeah, what's interesting to me, sitting here on all three of these now coming together, we're one big group, and we have subcommittees, is the difference between the customers of light-duty and medium- and heavy-duty. And the gentleman from NADA brought that up really clearly 30 minutes ago or something like that. And particularly, when we talk about education and perception, because the commercial—in the depot world, they're learning fast.

They're learning fast about what the utilities can do, can't do, what the infrastructure behind the fence, in front of the fence. Pardon me, I'm still working on my utility language. I have been to three utility conferences in the last month. I'm trying. But there's that group of trucking fleets or even like Prologis with the sites. But people that were going to be asking for the power at the site in trucks, I think, have a whole different—it's a business-to-business relationship with the utilities rather than sort of—like this customer, like these single customers.

So, I think that makes it very different. And also, I think we need to think about how we take advantage of that difference. I think maybe we can go a little faster with the depots because we're—trucking depots, because we're talking about a bunch of vehicles at one site that's going to need a lot of demand. But I think that's an "aha" for me this morning a little bit.

Rachael Sack: Any other comments or questions? Henrik?

Henrik Holland: I think I didn't pick it out here. In terms of grid integration, I think another really important aspect of grid readiness, especially as it comes to larger loads, like in the medium- and heavy-duty space. There is I think really important area of distributed energy with respect to both behind-the-meter generation as well as storage that can be used to alleviate grid concerns. So, I would encourage the committee not just to look at things from a centralized to a consumer energy systems perspective but also look at the distributed nature of some of the solutions that are out there and how that can interplay with grid modernization.

Nadia El Mallakh: We agree. We've discussed that, and I think we're talking about future generation units. We didn't really define parameters. Typically, we would all think of the utility scale generation rate, wind farm, solar farm, might be a natural gas generation unit, et cetera. But certainly, that's, I think, part of the picture. I would also note that we have a big focus on managed charging as well because that's going to be a critical piece of this. So, for affordability, for efficiency, for optimizing the existing grid.

Speaker: And so, we did have some comments in here about that. Those are good points. I'll just add plus one to the managed charging because I think that's—well, I think that's the whole kit and caboodle in some ways. We have to ensure that we have a feature that has ubiquitous opportunity for managed charging, which requires data standards and a technology layer, a digital layer, that I think—again, I think this is, again, not in your immediate priorities, but I would love to see that as a sequential priority. Because I think that can be an opportunity, but it could also be a barrier if it's not addressed.

Nadia El Mallakh: We actually did prior—when we get to the next, we did think about prioritizing that because it really goes hand in hand with some of the comprehensive planning. So, as we've been talking about not all use cases and vehicles are the same. So, some, if you're renting a rental car for a week and you need to get those cars changed out and charged to go, 20 minutes is your average turn time. It's going to be really hard to do overnight managed charging. So, it depends on the use, the duty cycle, all of those things.

But we identify that as a key focus area, actually in our top three priorities. So, I think you'll appreciate that when we get to that next section of updates.

Rachael Sack: Great. So, not seeing any other comments. Rachael, I actually had a question for you. You noted this afternoon we'll probably reconvene and look at this report to figure out our next steps. But in the meantime, with some of the comments that are less administrative, do you want people to start addressing them as changes, deleting the comments, just starting to gradually clean up? But maybe the idea that tonight would be a cleaner version that everyone would be able to review for a vote tomorrow.

Rachael Nealer: Yep, I would like to just take the temperature of the room right now. How are people feeling about the report after this discussion? Do we feel like we're headed towards a consensus vote, especially with these additions? Or do we feel like it needs a lot more work? Who feels ready to vote on this tomorrow, pending we make some of these changes? Okay, great. So, how about we work towards—maybe during the break, we can come up with a little bit of a fleshed-out timeline to get to a clean report tomorrow?

And we can just make sure that we're—because it has to be a little bit sequential, right? So, John's going to have to work on this a little bit. Nadia will have to work on a little bit. Hendrik, if you want to add any comments, too. But then we also want to get to a cleaner draft tomorrow from administrative team. So, during the break, why don't—we can sketch out a little bit of that timeline so that we all have a clear direction to work towards. Good.

Michael Berube: That's good. We didn't talk about the section too much that weren't the subcommittee pieces. Did you want to hit any of those or—

Rachael Nealer: If there's anything that you want to call out, Michael, I see you made some edits last night. So happy to have—they seem pretty minimal. So, if we just want to—minimal and administrative, it seems like. But if you'd like to walk through any of those comments, happy to have you do that.

Michael Berube: There's one—I guess one kind of key point, it's not a lot of words, but that I kind of interject in there a little bit, that the—I guess feeling I've had, and I've heard from a few members as well. That while we have these three areas we focused on and make sense and kind of officialize to do things, there are a lot of other issues, too, to address, and if you feel called on some comments. So, in a few cases, I just tried to slightly soften a little bit, that the word that was not necessarily just aligned by these three things.

And this defines, and this is the only thing we're going to look at, that these are now among the initial things. There'll be other things, maybe that we need additional work on. Maybe some of these working groups disband. And also, a little bit—embedded a little is a heavy—medium-, heavy-duty focus, which you agree to as a specific area. But elsewhere, we can't lose track that the vast majority of charging will be in light-duty, which will be far more. It'll be a different type. There are different issues and pieces.

So, I wanted to make sure that doesn't quite get lost as well. So, I—you can't quite read all that in the comments, but that's why I made a few of those changes in there, to try to—I felt like it was really oriented right now to describe. The group will be these three subgroups, and that's how we will be doing all of this.

Rachael Nealer: Yep. And I think we tried to frame that, but thanks for strengthening it, that these are the initial priorities. And we do have to provide a little bit of structure so that we can get some work done. But agreed that, I think you said the working groups would be disbanded, but I think you meant subcommittees. So, we have the ability to create subcommittees and reintegrate them into the working group, et cetera. But inevitably, and this will come up later in our discussion of some of the procedural and administrative updates, everything has to be reviewed by the primary EV Working Group before it is published by the working group.

So, subcommittees are not able to put anything out on their own. We have to go through the process of having the whole working group review it, which is part of the process that we're undergoing right now with this report. So, thank you for strengthening that, Michael. I agree that we have a good amount of time to spend with each other over the next couple of years. So, let's not box ourselves into static priorities, but rather leave the door open for evolution.

Speaker: A quick question, Rachael. When is the next report due?

Rachael Nealer: The next report is due in two years. So, we have a lot of time. And we're going to talk a little bit about—so, I promised you guys in the last meeting that I would sketch out what I thought potential products could be from this EV Working Group. So, I'm going to lay that out for you guys with some examples. We'll talk. I actually think the process of EV Working Group reviewing these products is probably going to be the long pole in the tent. But we should kind of lay out the spectrum of products. I think that—and I mentioned this in the last meeting as well, we will have reports, period.

Our goal is to provide recommendations and to have reports. I am not worried about legislative deadlines two years from now. I would like us to make sure that we're focusing on really good content and making really good timely recommendations. So, we will get this report finalized. We'll be—first, through our first milestone, and then we can start talking about what the next one looks like. We do have a brainstorm later today to pull all of these things together, especially after we hear the subcommittee report outs and how things are working as subcommittees and as a whole working group. But we're still growing, growing together. Theme of the day.

Rachael Sack: Right. With that, we're right on time. So, thank you for a really fruitful discussion on the report and for the subcommittees' hard work in getting the edits there and the continued hard work to get us to our final version. So, we're going to take 15 minutes for a break, and we'll reconvene at 11:00. Again, restrooms are right before and after the elevator. And if you are going downstairs, can we have someone, yep, bring people? Yes, okay. 15 minutes. So, thank you. There's water here as well, if folks want some water.

Speaker: Cheers. Yeah, there's two right in the side of this. I'm going to double check.

Rachael Sack: Before we concerted with our subcommittee updates, I just wanted to give you a preview of this afternoon since we've been talking about having more time to continue to work on the report. So, when we return from lunch, we will still have a technical presentation on the EPRI presentation from 1:30 to 2:00. So, why don't we give the subcommittees a half hour to use some of our conference rooms here and breakout to just look at those edits and comments from—discussed this morning that are in the report?

And that'll give you some time to do some cleanup or additions because we are hoping to have a pencils-down approach by the end of the day to give you time to do a final read-through tonight before voting. We'll continue to talk about that, make sure everyone's comfortable with that. But know that you have a half hour after our presentation after lunch to be able to work as a subcommittee and just do some cleanup and any final edits.

And then we'll continue to have time during our brainstorming session this afternoon to just talk in more detail about activities and what things look like down the road. Okay, so with that, we are going to hear from each subcommittee a little more about what you have been working on since our last meeting and what is on the horizon. So, if you could keep it to about 10 to 15 minutes per update, that would be excellent. Start with grid integration.

Speaker: All right, we're back. So, we meet every other week. We have a standing meeting. Folks pop in when they can. We've been focusing on how do we refine our priorities and what do we want to tackle first, what's the low hanging fruit. So, on that, along those lines, a few areas that we've identified are thinking about specifically—and Michael was mentioning it. We know we have our medium- and heavy-duty focus but thinking about the light-duty vehicle segment and how do we find some consensus around and among the key stakeholders on managed charging.

So, I kind of tip the hat on that priority. We also really want to think about how do we help speed up interconnection requests and think through that. What kind of data does the utility need? We were just—Ruth and I were just having a great conversation on an aside about a project she had with her company and a utility. Sometimes it's even asking the correct question from both sides. And so, we want to think about that in partnership with the other subcommittees.

And then we did identify convenient, accessible, affordable charging for multifamily and non-residential use cases, primarily, but we didn't we didn't segregate that as between light-duty and medium- and heavy-duty. But we did talk about that. We were thinking a little bit more about light-duty vehicles. We also have started an inventory, and we'll solidify a process here. But in the grid integration subcommittee folder is a draft inventory.

So, we wanted to get a holistic inventory of tools data studies that relate to grid integration, just to federal, non-federal studies, so that you could have not a review of what they—like endorsing them, we're not, but just, here's this study that was completed, or here's this tool that was completed by X entity, brief blurb of what it is. And then if it's either published or if it's pending note, that and where they can find it.

So, we've started that, and we'd like to figure out a process to open that up to the full working group to make sure that we've captured—and obviously, it will be a living document, capture that information. So, that's an item. We did get a draft ready for this meeting, and we'd like to conclude that. I'm going to put a date. I have to talk to my fellow committee members, but I think hopefully within a month. We've heard a lot of other inventory topics, so maybe there might be an opportunity to blend that into something else.

And those—we've also talked a lot about best practices. And I know, mayor, you've mentioned this and other groups are working on that. Sounds like we're going to circulate some helpful information, but we'd like to start documenting some best practices too.

Speaker: Yeah. I want to give it at the end, the framing we talked about and those really, really big issues a little bit. So, tell me when you want me to give it.

Nadia El Mallakh: Yes, so I will. And we've had some additional also, some meetings last, gosh, about three weeks ago, where we pulled together various stakeholders, just on getting some updates when some folks are in town, particularly the utilities for EEI and Alliance for Transportation Electrification meeting. And I think we also had a meeting. So, we talked about some priorities there. And so, I'm going to turn it over to Michael to share some of those.

Michael Berube: And Mark and others in the group, chime in. So, we've really tried to take a step back and ask the question of outside folks. What are the one or two absolute roadblocks that have not solved, you won't see large scale EV adoption image in this kind of—and these grid type folks, utilities, team members, others. And after listening to all that, we summarized that there are a few really, really big roadblock issues. And we asked, what will it take to solve those? What will take solve those?

One of the very top ones was there has to be investments being made in the grid at the distribution level and also at new generation. In order to do so, there has to be confidence to make investments. And in order to have confidence in utilities or for PUCs to authorize that investment, they are deathly afraid of affordability issues. And how will this get paid for? How will it affect the rate base for people overall? And will there be return on this investment?

So, if we're going to solve this kind of logjam, we have people—we need to build confidence among those people that—what the load will be, where it will be, and how will the affordability issues be managed. Without that, you're going to continue to have this roadblock of not having investment, and that will stymie the effort. So, to build that confidence, one of the things is you've got to show people that affordability will be addressed. How do you do that?

One of the key things is managed charging can help you reduce the amount of investment you need, which then helps solve some of those issues. A lot of challenges, so one of the big action items is we have to find a way to move pretty quickly. Like, I'm talking in the next handful of months, I think, among, between utility, automakers, and EVSC companies, agreement on how can manage charging happen. It won't happen on its own. It's going to have to have some amount of coordination and agreement among those parties.

What's the protocol? What works? What is it? How does it work? So, that was like a big thing of getting the conference. The other big one is getting data out there on where the loads will be, medium- and heavy-duty, work we hear from EPRI on that, and light-duty as well. So, that's a big thing. I think there's good work happening. But how do you get data so people have confidence where the loads will be?

And then the last big thing that came up is kind of stymieing things, which is a little less than the investment was, the time it's taking to make installations and addressing that. And part of that, we came down a little bit of education. There's a little bit of planning, knowledge, integrated planning, but finding ways to address the time it's taking to energize. We started brainstorming what are the specific actions. So, we're trying to develop this framework of, what are the big issues on the top?

How do you then ultimately boil it down to, to solve that, this has to happen, and who needs to work on that thing to solve those bigger issues? So, our goal is to actually make a visual map, a little like flow chart map of this, to come down to, maybe there's 15, 20 items. Maybe there's four or five big ones at the end. So, that's kind of a quick visual.

Speaker: Of the team members, the only the only thing I would add in is, with technology adoption, whether it's EVs or otherwise, there's the current state, the interstate, and the future state. And that's really the struggle that we're having. And how do you define those? What's the timing between those? And a lot of that stuff is not entirely knowable.

Michael Berube: Yeah. This idea someone mentioned, building ahead. And one of the big challenges in utility world is—just a great presentation, California utilities, where they are building ahead. They're building what they think they need to build. That requires investment today that will have payback. People will use that investment to charge, and there'll be revenue from that. But the revenue from the charging will come three, four years later. In the meantime, ratepayers have to pay that three, four years of investment.

And that's leading to an increase in rates, which is a challenge for people to stomach. And then we have to also recognize that this is happening at the same time tremendous pressure on the grid to add investments for resiliency, concerns. And then there's also other load other than [INAUDIBLE] education. Although transportation is a really big one, data centers keep coming up as this other big thing. And I would say maybe the one this time, it takes one of the things that came up in discussions was a lot of utilities.

The people coming to us who, on the transportation side, one, they come to us late. Or two, they don't even know—a typical fleet will come to us. Maybe not your team because you guys have it on top. But others say, I'm adding truck charging. Well, how many trucks? I don't know, most probably. I don't know. I don't know. And the utilities like—and then half the time you go to utility, they don't have someone to even answer the question.

Data centers, if you have a data center, you had a whole team, you know what it is, who they're going to. And it all starts flowing, they get all the attention. They get all the love to a certain degree because it is just a lot easier, clear, and more manageable. So, helping to solve that of both the user side, if you will, the person asking for the loads and the utilities.

Rachael Sack: John, do you have a comment?

John Bozzella: I just wanted to make just a brief plug for one of the things you mentioned, Michael, in terms of the barriers and this sort of, how do you effectuate manage charging and sort of deal with—manage the public utility commission process and all of that. We heard comments about that, public versus EV Working Group meeting, as I recall, people who were focused on that. From an auto industry perspective, we're doing that.

So, we're engaged. So, I would just identify that as a very tangible next step that we can probably coalesce around is, how do we work with the public utility and public service commissions on a program to be able to create that type of future? So, we're all in on that.

Speaker: Excellent, all right. I'm going to work to have that meeting meaningful. Representing EVSC world here, you can bring in that side of it.

Speaker: No, I think, overall, from just listening to the conversation, there's a lot of technology out there, that I am coming back to the education aspect because I'm taking fewer notes. There's a lot of information I can make available. You just need to coach me at what point I need to stop selling. Again, there is solutions for almost everything. There's a lot.

Rachael Sack: Great, thank you. I'm just going to ask, in the future, down there, if you can speak up a little.

Speaker: Oh, yes.

Rachael Sack: All right, I think—thanks to integration group for that update. Now, we can move on to the medium- and heavy-duty subcommittee. Are there any updates?

Mike Roeth: Yeah. Yeah, I can provide some. It's been crazy three months in medium and heavy electric trucks, I would call it. I'm cautious to say that because we're all working hard, and it's all crazy, right? It's all just stuff we're trying to help with the transformation. But from things like, and I won't cover. I'll miss a bunch, right? But things like the amount of infrastructure incentives that are out there, the Greenhouse Gas Phase 3 rule that was announced on Friday.

Various associations leaning in, one of which is the clean freight coalition that put out the trillion dollars for the grid to support medium and heavy electric trucks in U.S., I think. So, there's just a lot out there. Some of it can be confusing to all of us trying to make this happen, whether we're actually people putting electric trucks in the operation, all the way to folks like Rakesh and I and the team here that are out there, supplying trucks or doing analysis and et cetera.

So, I just wanted to say that, not as an excuse, but I think this is a really—I'm going to call it confusing time in the early transformation. With that, in December, we talked about how to, having to really need a baselining for medium- and heavy-duty subcommittee. So, what that looks like to us is inviting those organizations to come and talk to us about their studies, getting into the details. If they're a little more biased studies, they tend to have less available in the public domain around the assumptions on the analysis.

And we would like to be able to work with them on directly as a subcommittee with asking them to come in and present to us. So, with that, we we're going to up our meeting cadence to allow for that. That's one point. Second point is—and Henrik talked about it really well, and I think it's really important point for this group and our subcommittee, is applications or market segments of medium and heavy trucks to lead us to good TCO education.

Just a quick point of fact, I know you guys probably all know this. But heavy-duty trucks, class 8 trucks. There are sleeper trucks. They can do 500 miles a day with 11 hours of service. Driver sleep in the truck and move on. There's also refuse class 8 trucks, 600 stops a day, picking up garbage at every house. Incredibly different use case but still class 8 trucks. And then the third one I bring up is yard tractors, those tractors that never leave a warehouse yard, that move trailers around to the docks and so forth.
So, that's an example of probably 100 use cases that Rakesh and I could rattle off to you all in minutes, not hours. It makes it really hard around total cost of ownership because it's easy to say in that yard tractor that electric yard tractors are ready for TCO parity with diesel, and they kind of are. But you get into the long haul disparate route sleeper trucks, not so much. So, we are—I mean, that's a very big focus for us. I think we pulled it up to the top of the first report around segmenting the market at an appropriate level so that things like TCO calculation now makes sense.

It's not too general, and it's not too granular. So, I think that's a big part of what we want to get into and agree on as we're working on these base understandings of these reports. And then the last thing I say is, really excited about us doing some work on the hydrogen fuel cell, vis-a-vis, like battery electric trucks. As I get out, it's one of the biggest things. There's like this Godzilla versus I don't know what—there's this cage match between the two, and it's going to be both.

It's just going to be a matter of how much—I actually, I don't know if the subcommittee agrees with me, but it's basically how much can the battery electric truck do because of its simplicity compared to the hydrogen complexity. But I think we are uniquely situated to chime in on the whole hydrogen and battery electric piece versus what's out there with this big-like versus. So, we—I think I can speak for the whole committee. We're committing to doing more work than we've accomplished in the first few months and the next few months.

But it's been a real—I would say it's like one of those moments in the transformation of commercial battery electric trucks that are commercial, ZEV trucks, I would say, that's made it challenging over the last four or five months. Anybody on the subcommittee want to add anything to that?

Rakesh Aneja: Yeah, maybe just a couple of comments. So, great summary, Mike. And I just wanted to chime in on the baselining piece. I think that's a really important activity for us because there is a fair bit of information out there, a fair bit of initiatives that are ongoing. And I think we will really do well if we are able to get those folks and have a conversation with them and help them to inform our work going forward.

Yes, some studies may have a particular bias one way or the other, but that's our opportunity as well to really understand those assumptions and premises, challenge those where appropriate. And hopefully, this group comes up with an unbiased—I don't want to say single source of truth, maybe there is no such thing, but a very representative view of what it requires just to take the example of infrastructure effort. The other one related to the hydrogen point, I would emphasize that as well. I'm excited about that opportunity.

There are some studies out there quantifying the expense, the investment required if we have predominantly an electric infrastructure for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles versus predominantly a hydrogen infrastructure, and then a combination of the two. So, even from an investment perspective, there are some studies suggesting that a complementary approach would help lower the investment. So, those are the type of things also which would be very interesting for this group to get in.

Rachael Sack: Nadia?

Nadia El Mallakh: I would note, I think for some of the other subcommittees, that might be great, too, if you're bringing in certain folks to participate when you talk about investment or hydrogen. Also, what's the impact on the grid to generate what's needed to support the hydrogen? Sometimes that can be even more. So yeah, that would be great opportunity or even understanding, like you mentioned, the recent study, Mike, that had, I think, 300 billion for utility investment, understanding where those numbers kind of came from and which of the utilities. Do those come from utilities? And that's just one example, but I think kicking the tires collectively would be great.

Rakesh Aneja: And that's what I meant by challenging the assumptions, understanding the assumptions.

Nadia El Mallakh: Exactly.

Rakesh Aneja: To prove that's fair.

Nadia El Mallakh: Right. And that's just one. There's many examples.

Rakesh Aneja: And then even if it's a big number, I think, in general, let's understand what that number is. Over what period of time and what does it mean in the overall context, right? Numbers tend to stick attention span, for the average person, is maybe low. So, we don't want to get scared away by just the number but really understand it in its true context.

Nadia El Mallakh: Absolutely, yeah. So, I think we volunteer to—

Speaker: Yep.

Nadia El Mallakh: —a great idea to support that. Mark?

Mark Dowd: Just a quick question on TCO for heavy-duty. What is the value of getting that number out there?

Mike Roeth: Well, I mean, my thoughts are that the trucking industry, as someone said earlier, this is a tool, a very solid business tool. So, if one thing I've learned in almost 40 years is they're like the tenth of a penny per mile kind of management of these trucks. I mean, they know it. And this transformation is about educating the fleets around the elements of the TCO of an electric vehicle versus a diesel vehicle. But they'll get—they'll do the calculations.

I mean, it's embedded in their psyche. I mean, it's really truly there. So, I'm hoping to answer your question in a small amount. So, the value of that now is that a lot of the industry—some of the industry is looking at—some of the world is looking at trucking and saying hey, Mike Roeth, stop talking about TCO. This is what your future is. Go get it done. And they're saying, well, wait a minute, y'all buy goods that depend on our ability to do that at a reasonable cost.

So, I think now, with respect to TCO, the adopters today at 0.1% market share or whatever really low number there is, they're just wanting to know kind of relative what's the future look like as I'm leaning in. Because they do see it as a must in their business. It may not be this year, five years, 10 years, and they just want some confidence in the TCO. So, they want to know—they don't want it to be to the very detailed penny, but they want to know—let's talk about, really, the fleets or the people leaning in for the expenses of all this. They want to know what it generally is going to look like. You know what I mean? So, does that help?

Mark Dowd: Yeah. From a forecast—sometimes TCO's persuasion, right? We use TCO to persuade people to adopt. And I was just wondering whether or not there is a point where, are they looking for the entry point?

Mike Roeth: I think they're looking—no, they're looking for TCO in the midterm. They understand that there's going to be some investments in the short term. Some of the carriers have to buy these trucks. But there's charging, and they're already talking to their shippers and helping them with higher freight rates to be able to do that and make this work. So, I think it's the midterm. But they're also looking for, what are all this technology? And Matthew even saying for some time, there's a lot of very difficult to monetize benefits of electric trucks.

In the last meeting, I talked about how much drivers like it. If our driver turnover drops from—in some cases, for higher fleets, from 100% driver turnover annually to 75%. That's a TCO number. That's a real benefit to the buyers of these trucks. They don't have drivers leaving their company because they don't like driving for that company. Now, they've got an electric truck that they really like.

My point is there's a whole bunch of elements in that TCO. So, they're looking for not just directionally in the midterm, what's the number going to be for my business? But they're also, what are just all the pluses and minuses? I mean, one of the things that I'm not seeing yet. Oh, I got to buy infrastructure, or I might have to buy—invest in the infrastructure, the utility across the fence.

So, I think it's both directionally in the details of what's going to cost me or benefit me but also would help me understand what are all the elements I should look for, for both risk and cost and opportunity and improvements in my in my financials with electric trucks.

Mark Dowd: Thank you.

Mike Roeth: Yeah.

Rachael Sack: Okay, two more comments. I see Henrik and Rakesh.

Henrik Holland: So, just maybe putting a finer point on that. I think what we're seeing today in the logistics industry is, in the absence of a clear picture of what all components of TCO are, customers are going to move at the pace of regulation versus at the pace of really what the commercial opportunity would perhaps imply. And frankly, that's kind of where we are a little bit today. We were in a state of exuberance, I think in 2021, some of 2022.

But I think where we are today is where lead operators are frankly moving a little bit more at the pace of regulation versus really leaning into the opportunity because of where we are in the business cycle. So, huge opportunity I think for us to address that and support whatever needs to be done to provide the clarity on the opportunity from a cost perspective. One more comment, I just want to underline, for the medium- and heavy-duty space, again, the unique needs of this particular segment as it comes to the power side of the equation.

So, I think working together with the other subcommittees on this is really, really important. I personally have been accountable for both building passenger and medium- and heavy-duty, and they are very, very different projects. Generally, when you do the lighter-duty projects, unless there are very large charging locations, you can do this behind existing service of a multifamily housing, you might need to see a little bit of an expansion.

When you look in medium- and heavy-duty, you're looking at completely new service, new meters, megawatts, 10 plus, 20, 30 megawatts. Perhaps leaning into even what data center power requirements are, which means that there's a whole different process that you're going through in terms of working that through with utility and a very different timeline associated with that. So, just to underline I think the importance of really focusing on the unique needs and what is required to address those challenges.

Rachael Sack: Thank you. Rakesh.

Rakesh Aneja: Thank you. Yeah, Mike and Henrik did an excellent job on the TCO. It's a tough act to follow. Just two additional points I wanted to make on that. So, TCO, super important for sure. But the other barrier for us is also the initial acquisition cost and price. So, it's not always the TCO piece, the first barrier. The cost of these trucks can be a stumbling block as well.

Henrik Holland: Yeah, totally.

Mike Roeth: I've always said trucking fleets will find the money for increased upfront cost. Not maybe now.

Speaker: Yeah.

Mike Roeth: It's three times the purchase price. And now, it's getting to the—

Rakesh Aneja: And now, we're really getting into the final points, right? So, TCO, super important but also initial cost.

Mark Dowd: That incremental is something that we struggle with also.

Rakesh Aneja: Right, and factor of two to three today is what we say, and that's a barrier. The second point is how I think it connects to—well, the combined working group effort is on energy costs, for example. So, we want to bring—improve the TCO. So, the more favorable the energy cost, per kilowatt hour for electric truck, the better off you'll be. And that then comes into utilization of that depot, what time of day you're charging and the demand charges and peak charges and so forth.

So, as we look at the green freight corridor, for example, how are we setting up these corridors? What sites get electrified first? How are those sites getting utilized? And that will impact dollar per kilowatt hour. So, it's all connected, and it's a super, super important part of not only the medium- and heavy-duty vehicles but the combined working utilities.

Mark Dowd: Looking at Becky shaking her head.

Rachael Sack: I want to make sure time for charging networks. So, are we okayto move there, Mike?

Michael Berube: I just want to just give just a quick comment on this thread to a lot of—like you mentioned, about all classes of vehicles. When we get to the discussion, a lot of times, people outside tend to focus on the tractor trailer. They think about that, especially when these regulations came out. Everyone talked about that. But when we think about TCO, and a lot of these is going to vary very differently, from your threes and fours, your six and sevens, to your tractors.

And just as we're talking about, I know you guys all know that as a team. But as we're talking the larger group, I think it's really important we emphasize that, think about that, think about the differences between where those things will be, especially as we're communicating out to the outside world. Penetration is going to be very different initially in by class because of the TCO case.

Speaker: Right.

Rachael Sack: Okay, thanks, everyone. Now, we're going to move to the charging network subcommittee.

Speaker: Great, yeah. You know, I've really enjoyed this conversation about TCO. So, here's what would be great. If we could get the electric vehicles, the light-duty vehicles that our companies build, on your heavy-duty vehicles that are EVs to these guys, the dealers and the rental car companies, at a lower cost per mile than we're paying today, that would be great. Can we do that? So, any event, the point I'm making, I know it's a little too cute by half.

But the point is there's an overall sort of affordability question to the transformation that's going to be challenging wherever you look, right? And so, that's one of the I think powerful things behind the whole working group. Okay, charging network subcommittee. First, a shout-out to the subcommittee members. Really good cross section of this group, including auto manufacturers, state transportation officials, rental cars, equitable, cities, GSA, NADA, Siemens, thank you, Tribes.

So, this has been—and USDOT, of course. So, really good conversation. We've been meeting monthly. Roughly, I think we do need to increase the cadences other subcommittees have referenced. So, let me give you a recap of the last couple of meetings. First—and some of this is going to be repetitive of the report. First, metrics. Again, a broken record on this. We continue to discuss the importance of metrics.

We're not only talking about the number of chargers necessary to meet demand but also ensuring that the charging stations are deployed in an equitable way. That was an important commentary among the subcommittee. The reliability of the charging stations, in other words, what the downtime is, or how many of the stations aren't functional. Multiple unit dwelling charging, which we talked about earlier, and we'll supplement in our report, as well as supply chain, which affects charging.

The second big theme of our discussions was interoperability. This has been a big focus of the discussions so far, and it's far-reaching. And it's beyond the scope of the subcommittee. So, we talked about interoperability in the following ways. Charging connector and software, vehicles, data, battery management, that whole set of issues. We also think there's an interoperability question as it relates to the grid integration subcommittee. And so, more discussions need to take place I think broadly across the working group.

I think there was a comment made, standards certainly have a role to play. But we also need to ensure that security and safety are front of mind. And I know we'll be talking a little bit about that tomorrow, right? So, cybersecurity, safety security. Another big theme of the discussions is where to build. So, we discussed an inherent issue, which I referenced earlier, with localities often being sort of in a different place or in different silo from states.

Comments were made about localities needing to be brought in earlier in the process, which I think was referenced by the mayor earlier. Because when those conversations happen later in the process, we have a delay in the build out-of-network and a delay in things like building codes for buildings that are being built now, whether they're commercial or residential. And so, we do think the working group could be a convener of those types of discussions, best practices, building codes, those types of things.

We talked about in this space about where to build permitting also remains an issue. Every state and locality is different. And so again, the mayor referenced this. Best practice is to aid in speeding up the permitting process. We talked about operation, reliability, and redundancy are critical to broader EV adoption. The subcommittee recommends that the ChargeX Consortium brief the subcommittee or even the full EV Working Group on some of their activities.

With regard to federal activities, we talked about a map of federal charging infrastructure activities, not only current investment but best practices and guidance, and also activities that are underway but not yet complete. And then finally, with regard to potential speakers for the subcommittee or perhaps even for the full working group, Geotab to provide a briefing on work that they've done on real-world applications and the use of EVs. GSA, in terms of how things are going with regard to fleet electrification.

And then again, referencing Ruth's comments earlier, Siemens has done a lot of work around interoperability. And we think there's an opportunity for more of an update and perspective from Ruth on interoperability. So, I would then now defer to the subcommittee members who might want to add or subtract.

Sharky Laguana,: Sure. I don't know where the right place to put this is. And so, I'm just going to bring it up. Right now, the subcommittees are very charging-centric. It's around the grid. It's around the grid integration. There is some discussion of the concerns of medium heavy-duty. I enjoyed the conversation about TCOs. But from our members' perspective, one of the issues that they have run into and has been a very large pain point is the workforce to service and maintain the vehicles themselves and the availability of body parts, service parts that—the supply chain around the parts themselves.

And so, it feels like there's a little bit of a gap here in terms of how we're looking at things. I totally agree that the charging grid is the top priority from perspective of consumer adoption. But once they've adopted, if they have a Tesla sitting in the shop for three months because of a bumper, which is something our members have encountered. Or there's simply nobody available to work on the electrical systems in the vehicle, period. And now, they're looking for even a minor issue, months of being without their vehicle.
Then what we're going to see is a high expression of pain points in the media and peer-to-peer and on a friend level. So, it just—I just want to observe that that appears to me to be a hole or a gap in terms of how we're looking at this issue.

John Bozzella: Yeah, just to note, we do reference workforce in our list of priorities in the report. But I totally agree with you. That should be built out a little bit. And so, I think your comment is really well-taken.

Rachael Nealer: Supply chain as well, John.

John Bozzella: Yes.

Rachael Nealer: So, there's a materials aspect, and there's also—

John Bozzella: Right, 100%. So, workforce—so from the customer back, workforce back to supply chain.

Sharky Laguana: Yeah. The workforce stuff, I saw in the document. The way I read it, it appeared to be more around the workforce around installing chargers and maintaining the chargers. So, I just wanted to point out there's a separate concern around the vehicles themselves, and that is a big input to that TCO.

Speaker: It's a great point.

Michael Berube: Although, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that other brands are in place on people who are spending a lot of money right now and getting ready to service those vehicles and are going to be there. So—

Sharky Laguana: Fantastic, great. I appreciate that.

Rachael Sack: Laura, Nadia, and Crystal.

Laura Chace, ITS America: So, I agree with all those comments. I feel like what we're really talking about here—and I think it transcends all of the subgroups, and it, maybe it is another overlying issue for the committee, is a sustainable transition. And I'm not using sustainable in the energy sense, financially sustainable. And we see this with new emerging technologies in every field. There's always a rush and a push with money and funding and opportunities to invest.

But we need to make sure that those investments are sustainable over the long term, which goes to the TCO, which goes to some of these other conversations we've been having. And I feel like the workforce piece is a huge piece of this, the supply chain. I feel like it almost all houses under another category of how do we ensure that this transition is sustainable. And it ties into even the location of charging stations that we've talked about. So, when the federal money runs out, how do we ensure that those stations are going to be profitable, are going to be maintained?

And it goes to the cost of energy. So, I just feel like that's a—to me, it's a little bit of an overarching challenge, if you will, for the committee to be addressing. That's at least my perception. Thank you.

Rachael Sack: Nadia?

Nadia El Mallakh: I just wanted to—I was, because I looked at it, our little pyramid and just refreshed for our crosscutting topics, for all three of these and for all of us, I guess. We're equity workforce and supply chain, so I do think workforce supply chain are there and equity, as you mentioned. But maybe we need to keep bumping that up because we did decide back in December that those three were our core crosscuts. And labor, totally agree. I mean, all of us have an example.

Who's going to build the grid? Who's going to, who's going to build the equipment, that charging equipment. Who's going to repair the vehicles, all of that? So, good points.

Rachael Sack: Crystal.

Crystal Philcox, Office of Travel, Transportation and Logistics, Federal Acquisition Service: Yeah, when we talked about gaps, like maintenance and repair, workforce, and we talked about total cost of ownership. And I'm sure Sharky's members have had some of this happen as well. But just as we operate a fleet, we are—over the last two years, we probably saw maintenance and repair costs increase 40% over the last 18 months, two years. And we do not have—we don't, certainly don't have a majority yet of EVs.

So, I just want to be—as we're talking about some of these gaps in total cost of ownership, make sure we're differentiating between EVs and ICE vehicles. I mean, there is a huge cost we're experiencing just on connected vehicles at this point and all of the sensors that all vehicles have on them right now. So, when we're talking about maintenance and repair and total cost of ownership, just factoring that.

Speaker: But there are certain suppliers that are particularly frustrating. I've elected to do so without naming.

Speaker: During the offsets on the electric vehicle side, because of the simplicity in the 80%, 90% fewer parts, where you're not seeing the offset because the suppliers are so backed up on the supply chain.

Speaker: I think the—EVs have less moving parts. So, in theory, they should have fewer issues. What we have are two things that are happening kind of in parallel. One is the EVs that are currently commercially available. Some of them have extremely high acceleration rates. So, you put those in the hands of consumers that have never had the experience of pressing an accelerator doing this.

I drove my family absolutely berserk when we rented one because I had to keep doing it over and over again. But—and I'm not saying that I have capable hands. But in less capable hands, that leads to collisions and accidents and body damage. And so, that has increased for our members, the number and frequency of body damage. It was a surprisingly large number. And definitely as compared to ICE vehicles, it was higher. But we think that's a function of how these vehicles are currently designed.
So, that's one.

Second is that, yes, the availability of these body parts and the availability of the workforce that can actually work on these vehicles, combined with, as Crystal pointed out, even as compared to ICE vehicles, those costs are higher. So, these two factors are colliding to create a, not a perfect storm, but certainly it's made—it's superseded that offsetting factor that you're alluding to, which is in theory, they should be cheaper to operate and maintain. But in terms of practical reality, as it exists right now, they are not.

Rachael Sack: Andy and John, and then we will wrap it up to move to the next item.

Andy Koblenz: David's question is a great one. We get it all the time. Aren't you worried that your service workers is going to all go away? And the answer is, it's going to evolve, it's going to change. And that the—couple of things. One is nothing happens in a vacuum. The cars are evolving and other areas, all the sensors that are coming on, there's going to be a higher service cost. I think the OEMs have not yet perfectly optimized their manufacture.

I think the cost—the early, early EV repair costs are high, but I think they're going to come down as the, they improve the process of manufacturing. So, the short answer is I think I would not actually prioritize service and repair of EVs as a impediment to broad adoption. I think the service and repair will take care of itself, and it will be available as they come on. And so, I would put it lower. It's certainly should be on the list, but I would put it lower on the list on the other workforce issues, I think.

John Bozzella: I agree with that, yeah. I was just going to make the same—a very similar comment. This is temporal, there's this temporal. I do think there is service and maintenance issues that are different in fleet contexts than there are in private ownership contexts. And so, I think in the private ownership context, we're seeing a fairly typical sort of dynamic in the service and maintenance area, again with one exception.

So, I'm not quite as—and I don't think you're dismissive of what I do think it still makes sense to talk about, workforce in the maintenance and service area because of the importance of fleet applications to early adoption. So, I would just reference that.

Rachael Sack: Thank you, everyone, for a great session. This will continue to help your activities in the report we're talking about, the next steps, and everything that we'll cover over these next two days. We're going to jump to our next item since we have a guest to join us, legal counsel with the Joint Office. We heard you at our last meeting with some questions about your role as a member of the working group, how you can interact with others, even bringing in speakers to help inform your activities.

So, we wanted to pose a few questions, see what we could learn in this discussion. And then inevitably, there'll be questions we have to get answers to and come back to share with you all. But we'll take a start here and work through a few things. So, Chao, can you hear us? And can we hear you?

Chao Pan, General Counsel’s Office, Department of Energy: I can hear you. Can you hear me? Test one, two, three.

Rachael Sack: Yes, all right, success.

Chao Pan: Excellent. Excellent.

Rachael Nealer: Rachael, is there anything you wanted to add before we jump in? Yeah, no, I think this is—Chao's here to really give us an overview of how we might be able to follow Federal Advisory Committee Act rules while also engaging with external stakeholders and running our operations of our subcommittee. So, as Rachael said, we took a lot of questions from the last meeting. We wanted to make sure that we were answering those and getting you the most up-to-date information so that you then can all turn around and run with it.

And we can expand the reach of this group and the amount of information that we're bringing in to really impact the recommendations of the working group.

Rachael Sack: Can you move to the next slide, please, Sara? And we collected a few questions, some of our own, some we heard from you. I don't know if all can be answered today, but we thought we could start with this and, of course, welcome the group to ask more.

So, Chao, looking at this list here from the rules of who our members can talk to and any procedural aspect of that or even conducting other surveys and data collection, are there any questions here that you can inform us on for awareness?

Chao Pan: Sure. So first, good morning, everyone. I don't think I've actually had the pleasure to meet this group yet. But I just wanted to introduce myself, and I'll give my quick spiel of what I do. So, my name is Chao Pan. I'm an attorney with the General Counsel's Office at the Department of Energy. Specifically, my group does ethics and standards of conduct for everyone on this committee or at least for the non-government members on this committee. What that means is that I'm a compliance lawyer.

It's a fancy way of saying I'm a compliance lawyer. And instead of legal compliance with all the regulations that apply to your companies, which assuming you have general counsel on your companies, I do compliance with federal laws and regulations as it applies to the federal government. So, that also means that I don't have a whole lot of expertise on some other things. However, within my office, what that means is that our office does FACA committees, Federal Advisory Committee Act committees.

Everyone on this group is either a regular government employee or a representative. What that means is that for the representative members, the ethics rules don't actually apply to you because you are not considered federal employees. You're not considered special government employees. That's great for you because it means you have far less paperwork to fill out. However, it also means that we are not keeping track of your conflict. So, I always take the initial meeting to try to give a quick spiel about my philosophy for FACA committees generally, right?

All FACA committees are advisory in nature. That means fundamentally, none of us have battalions to deploy, grants to give, or contracts to award, right? FACA committees don't have any of that. Your power lies in your persuasion and your ability to persuade. What that means is that you have to be transparent and, insofar as possible, avoid any reputational harm that comes from your actions. What that usually means for federal employees is that we take a look at their finances and say, hey, you have stock in XYZ company. Don't do anything that has to do with XYZ company.

Importantly, we did not ask that of the representative members sitting here today and online right now because we assume representative members are going to be biased because you're supposed to represent your industry. That said, it is important for you to take care to see—to take a look at your own finances, your own interests and say, hey, you might be representing, let's say, medium truck manufacturers, but you have a bunch of stock in Exxon Mobil. Maybe a bad example for the group here.
But let's say you had a bunch of stock in Exxon Mobil. Yeah, we're not tracking that in this office. For other committees, we will. And for federal employees, we will. But we're not tracking for representatives. What that means, though, is that if you're representing that industry and you have a bunch of stock in Exxon, if you suddenly take a position to advise committee to, yeah, maybe we should really be pouring more money into Exxon Mobil's EV development, whatever that may be. I'm not even sure they have any honestly.

That looks strange and weird. It's not technically illegal, like I said, but it's going to cause reputational harm. And the reports that you make are going to be questioned because now it looks like person X had an interest in pushing this agenda. So, that's my basic spiel for FACA committees. For ethics as a whole, you'll hear this if you talk to me again about any of this stuff. But the basic rule as I go into the questions is that we have to treat similarly situated entities in a similar manner.

As the federal government, we're not allowed to play favorites. As the federal government, we're not allowed to utilize our personal networks to elevate them in a way that is unfair to other competitors. So, with that said, I'll start answering some of these questions that we have so far. And then, of course I'll take any that happen to come up. All right, so rules for who you can talk to and the process. In general, the way the FACA rule is written is that it is a permissive rule and that anything that's not explicitly prohibited is allowed.

You're allowed to talk to pretty much anyone. I'm trying to think of scenarios where you'd be forbidden from talking to people. The—not the trick, the nuance comes in about the opportunities and the scenarios in which you've talked to them. So, very broadly, under FACA, we have open meetings and closed meetings, right? The weight of the law goes towards open meetings. That's the entire point of FACA committees.

They're supposed to be open and transparent to the public. That's why the law got passed in the first place. So, it didn't look like the government was getting secret advice from some cabal of people in a smoke-filled room. In that regard, not so much for this group so far, but for other committees that I staff, they have open meetings, literally open to the public. Anyone can talk to them. Anyone with an internet connection or can make their way to D.C., anyone can go talk to them. Anyone can give their opinion to them. That's okay.

The other side of that, for the closed meetings, it gets a bit more tricky. If you want to speak to certain entities in a closed manner that's not going to be open to the public, basically come talk to us because there are very specific requirements to have a closed meeting. And what you can—and if you don't, if you don't satisfy those requirements, you can't have a closed meeting. One of those things, though, is a very broad exception for taking in information. Sure, you're allowed to take in information in closed meetings.

You're not deliberating, and you're not analyzing the information at that point, but you're also taking in information. For who you can talk to, what's the process, there's not a whole lot of process, honestly.

Neither the FACA final rule nor the DOE, nor the DOE FACA committee really lays out a whole process for this. Most of this is done at the committee level. You all can decide how you want to do it. And that said, if you want to talk to foreign nationals, foreign companies, that's probably okay.

But come talk to us or come talk to your staff because there may be some reputational issues, if not legal issues, that come with that. Conducting surveys.

Rachael Nealer: Hey, Chao, can I?

Chao Pan: Yes.

Rachael Nealer: Before we move on to the next one, I think a lot of this is around subcommittees. So, the subcommittees do not need to necessarily be open. And so, are we able to—if the subcommittee decides they want a presentation on a report that just came out from an external stakeholder, are they able to just call that company up and say, hey, we'd like you to present to us? I think that's the scenario that we're trying to understand a little bit better so that our subcommittees are making progress in between the EV Working Group, larger meetings.

Chao Pan: Sure. So, the basic answer is yes. That's basically allowed. The only kind of caution I will give you is that, like I said in the beginning, there are certain reputational issues about whether as a committee, as a subcommittee, you keep going back to the same entities. And I have issues with some other committees where there are a lot of academics. The academics have other academic friends, and they have specific entities they keep going to.

For instance, if you happen to be from UT Austin or something, you like UT Austin, and you have a lot of colleagues in UT Austin. And you invite them to make reports. Well, the issue comes with, well, you keep inviting UT Austin. Now, it looks like UT Austin has an outsized role in this. So, treat similarly situated entities in a similar manner. It's certainly okay to get onesies and twosies reports from one entity, but try not to make a habit of it. Try not to keep going back to that same well.

Rachael Nealer: Great, thanks, Chao.

Chao Pan: Yep. Conducting surveys. So, that is an area that is not my expertise, thankfully. There's another group within GC that works on that. There are limitations. The Paperwork Reduction Act is a pain. What I would suggest is for those committees and subcommittees—or for those subcommittees rather that want to do that, shoot us an email about what you want to do, and we can craft something that would be legally permissible. The general answer is that there are ways to do it that are okay.

However, there are some ways to do it where you will trigger some other, frankly, onerous requirements that we would like to avoid, I would like to avoid, honestly. There are ways to do it, but shoot us your proposal beforehand in how you want to do something, and we can craft it so that it's okay.

Can subcommittees invite experts to talk with them outside of EV Working Group meetings? If so, can other EV members be invited to join? Yeah, I mean, the basic answer is yes. You can invite experts to talk to you outside of the meetings.

The only issue there is that you can take in information. But if you're going to deliberate and you're going to have a meeting of the whole committee or you're going to have a meeting of enough members where you're actually deliberating on things, that becomes problematic because those are supposed to be public. And I assume these subcommittee meetings, you don't want them to be public. So, in general, yes, but make sure it's intaking information. And you can ask questions, of course, in those meetings, too.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, Chao, just to clarify, I don't think we have any concerns with the subcommittee meetings being public or not. It's more of a logistical picture of, how do we make sure the notices get out there? So, it's more of, we want to make progress in between the EV Working Group meetings. We're not trying to keep things hidden at all. We just—if we're doing weekly or bi-weekly or monthly subcommittee meetings, that's going to be pretty burdensome if we have them be public each time.

Chao Pan: Yeah, and that's usually the case. Most committees aren't trying to hide their work.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah.

Chao Pan: It's exactly what you point out, because it is a pain to get things in the Federal Register. And for those not in the federal government, the Federal Register—I explained this the other day, is this theoretical long, giant document of lots of bound volumes of stuff that literally nobody reads. But actually, all my notes, if you're in the EV world, lots of rules get published in the Federal Register. And it's legally considered notice to the American people. In order to do that, there's an entire bureaucracy dedicated to updating the Federal Register.

DOE does not own it. There's another agency that owns it. I think it's General Services Administration that owns the Federal Register. And because of that, there is a whole interagency process to get something in the register that requires a good amount of lead time to get it in. If you want to do that, that's certainly something you can do. It just requires some advanced notice. That's at least two weeks, if not a month, for each meeting.

Although, I think you can probably announce multiple meetings in one Federal Register notice. That's fine if you want to do that. Totally your choice if you want to if you want to announce those meetings. And you can also, in the announcements themselves, refer to a website and say, hey, we'll have meetings here, here, and here. For any updates, go to this website, and you can see what future changes may be afoot. Yeah, it's possible to do if you want to. You don't have to do it.

Rachael Nealer: Chao, can I—oh.

Speaker: So, these can be—I'm sorry, these can be interactive sessions? These are not just presentations to the subcommittees. We can actually engage and ask questions of the experts?

Chao Pan: You are permitted to do that. The only thing is you should not deliberate. You should not make any decisions. You should not go towards making any decisions in these non-public meetings, assuming that they're non-public. If they're public, yes, do what you want. If they're public, you can do whatever you want. But if they're non-public or closed meetings, you should not deliberate and make decisions. But you can ask questions. You can clarify things, anything like that.

Barak Myers, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians: I guess, for me, so I serve on another committee, which is the Tribal Transportation Program Coordinating Committee formed under Federal Register. So, it's mandated. It's actually one of the only ones mandated under law. And I think—what I think about when we discuss subcommittees and the things is, so we're only required to do and publish formal meetings? So, it'd be like the full committee meeting, right? So, we meet four times a year, and those have to be open to the public. They have to be published.

Our subcommittees, we break out the subcommittees. We meet several times and even have certain calls within those. And we don't have to publish those because it's not required underneath the law because, again, they're not technically formal meetings. So, I think that would be the same format, right? So essentially, if subcommittees, as we meet, we're meeting to gather information. We compile that information, then we would bring that back to the full committee at our next meeting, so there wouldn't be any actions taken.

I guess, so I think that would clarify what you're saying. We can have the meetings, and it's like informational sessions, if you would. And you're gathering information, and then we take that back to a full committee if there's things that would have to be approved to, say, go into some report or things of that nature. So, those aren't technically open to the public. We never have denied folks. And we might do a separate subcommittee to say if the public would want to join.

But a lot of times, if you allow more participants that bogs the meeting down, because now you're having interaction and more comments and things coming in, so it's hard for the subcommittee to get information and the work needed to compile information when we do that. So, that's just a thought, was that I think it's required if it's the full committee, that you have to publish, that they have to be put out there.

But I don't think subcommittees have to be because it's not bound by law that says that the subcommittee—is just we can't make a decision as a subcommittee. And if that's official Electric Vehicle Working Group or anything, it has to be brought back to the full committee before any action can be taken.

Rachael Sack: Right. Chao, with two other hands raised, is there anything quickly you need to comment on that?

Chao Pan: No, I think that's right. Well, I'll get to the subcommittee part at the last question, but that can wait.

Rachael Sack: Okay, Nadia and Crystal, I see you had your hands raised. Yeah.

Crystal Philcox: Yeah, no, just to clarify what Barack said. So, we are—and what you said was no, you can't make decisions as a subcommittee. And so, that to me means, though, that we are discussing amongst ourselves. We are creating recommendations. We are deciding on what we would like to put forward to the full committee. But it's not we can't consider it official until the full committee has voted on. Is that what you're saying?

Chao Pan: That's right, the subcommittee has no existence—has no legal existence outside of being under the committee itself. And that does actually dovetail pretty nicely to my next point. It is vitally important that as a subcommittee, you only report to the committee, that you do not have any outside communication with the United States government. The reason for that is because if you report to United States government, that subcommittee becomes its own FACA committee and triggers its own FACA rules.

And then your meetings do have to be open, amongst other requirements. So, it's very important that every subcommittee understands that they can only report to the greater committee, not to any other agency or instrumentality of the United States.

Rachael Sack: Nadia, do you have a comment, question?

Nadia El Mallakh: So, I assume we have identified, and I know other subcommittees have specific subject matter experts that are not working group members. So, for example, like trade associations EI, APPA, nonprofits like ATE and/or EPRI, that we really want to bring in to our—for informational purposes, our regular meetings every other week. Assuming that's fine but wanted to just confirm. Again, it would be in the context of gathering information and probably have some folks on a standing basis join us.

Chao Pan: Yeah, that is a legally unobjectionable course of action. But I would just ask you to consider diversifying that guest list. Yeah, in some of your industries, there may be only one trade association. There may be only one or two players that are in that space. Fine. I don't know, you know better than I do, of course. But what we don't want to happen is that there's, I don't know, five or six big players.
You keep inviting one of them, and the other five players come knocking on the door and are like, hey, this one competitor we have is driving your policy, and these other were left in the cold. We don't want that to happen.

Nadia El Mallakh: Got it. Thank you.

Rachael Sack: All right, with the few minutes we have left here, I've been told the last question is something you may or may not be able to answer. We may have to go somewhere else. But do you have any insights on this last one?

Chao Pan: Sure. Prepares deliverable. It is very—that's what I touched on earlier. It is vitally important that it does not get delivered to Congress or the Department of Energy as a whole or any other federal agency. If you want to deliver it to the committee, prepare it for the committee, that's fine. You want to circulate it within the subcommittee, that's fine. Please, please, please do not deliver it anywhere else.

Does it get formally submitted somewhere if between Reports to Congress or just compiled to the next Report to Congress? Correct me if I'm wrong, I believe this committee is statutorily required to provide three reports. My recollection is that the statutes do not say you are limited to providing only three reports. So theoretically, you could, I guess, submit another report—or I'm sorry, the committee, not the subcommittees, but the committee could provide another report if it wants to.

I'll be honest, that doesn't happen very often because it's already enough work to make the statutory requirements, much less delivering more in addition to that. But there's nothing statutorily prohibiting additional reports. And moreover, I don't think that such provision would pass legal muster anyway. So, if you want to provide other reports, I mean, have at it, I guess, if you have the logistical capability to do it.
That said, Congress is going to be annoyed if you provide additional reports and then miss your deadlines for the statutory reports. So, keep that in mind.

Rachael Nealer: Thank you, Chao. Maybe to do a quick summary, so we have just a couple minutes left. Maybe we can just do a quick summary of how we're expecting to operate here, just all get on the same page based on your legal counsel, Chao. So, I think we have clarity now, that we can invite speakers to the subcommittee meetings, either on a one-off basis or if we want to provide a more regular representation for that entity in the subcommittees, that would also be allowable.

The nuance there is we want to make sure that we're being fair and equitable in the representation that we have and also that, you add one person, you might have to consider adding a couple more people. So, let's be very intentional about the perspectives that we bring into our subcommittees on a regular basis. But bringing in people for presentations is very allowed.

But that any deliberation, any recommendations that the subcommittee has needs to be run through the working group, broad membership, which is very similar to this process that we've been running on this first report, which is each of the subcommittees kind of weighing more heavily in on their sections. And then we have this broader discussion in the EV Working Group, and then we will take a vote for this report to be final.

I think the last aspect is that we need to figure out how we're going to run the operations of this report writing and balancing these three legislative deadlines along with what we're hearing. And I've heard now a couple different times, more timely and speedy recommendations from the EV Working Group on maybe some more narrow things.

So, that will lead us into the second part of our discussion, which is on product and process and how we might be able to develop some memos perhaps around very narrow scope questions versus very comprehensive reports that might take us a couple of years to develop and agree upon. So, I will probably just leave it there because we do have a lunch break. I'll just ask Chao if I misrepresented anything or if we're good with that summary.

Chao Pan: No, that all makes sense. Oh, the other thing I should point out, on the last part of the Report to Congress, in general, please don't go directly to Congress if you're going to make different reports. Go through the Department of Energy because you're an advisor—or rather the Joint Office, I guess, because you're an advisory committee under us.

Yeah, but otherwise, that's it. And if you need any help or have questions about anything, let me know. That's what we're here for. And I always figure that less you all see of lawyers, the better. So, enjoy.

Rachael Neaeler: Awesome. Thanks so much, Chao.

Chao Pan: Thank you. Have a good day, everyone.

Speaker: Thank you.

Speaker: Thank you.

Rachael Nealer: Thanks. You too. So, maybe just—we are adopting the agenda just a little bit to try to build in this finalizing of the report by the subcommittees. And we also have two agenda items in this time slot that I think we have plenty of space to cover later on as well. Specifically, how do we do some collaboration using the Huddle sites? And also, this conversation about process and how we might be able to do kind of a spectrum of products.

So, a discussion around those two things, I think we'll do that in the brainstorm. We have 45 minutes to brainstorm the future deliverables in next report. So, we'll add those as a piece of that. I would also start thinking a little bit, too, like, we've got these really great substantive subcommittee report outs. But also, how do we want to continue to operate these subcommittees?

Because what we're hearing is, work is happening in between the meetings, but we also need to bring the full committee along with us. And so, how do we want to solidify that? I know that some of the subcommittee decided that some of the administrative people like me to the meetings do. Is that a good thing? Do we want to have subcommittees meeting individually without someone like me or administrative help?

Let's just talk about how we've evolved since the last meeting and where we might be able to talk about some best practices. And I would also say to John, Laura, Denise, and Barak that you guys are also on other federal advisory committees. So, if you guys are seeing things, best practices that you think would be really useful here, open invitation to provide some of that feedback as well.

So, we can have that conversation later today. And we're going to do a short breakout of the subcommittees to finalize the report from 2:00 to 2:30, where we initially had another presentation. But we wanted to make sure that the subcommittees had enough time to do the report. So, we'll hear from Britta when we come back from lunch with the EPRI EVs2Scale, 2Scale initiative, which will be a great way to energize us after the lunch break. And then we'll break up into subcommittees and then revisit some of the procedural aspects.

Rachael Sack: Great. Can someone other than me give instructions to the group on how to—where to go to get lunch?

Rachael Nealer: Yes. So, across the street here is a food court plaza. There's an initial one. And then if you walk a little bit further, there's a whole bunch of other restaurants. Not the highest quality, sorry, can't deliver on that, but a lot of different options. What we make up for quality—or what we lack in quality, we make up in quantity.

So, if you just go directly down out that front door, you will have to walk down to the pedestrian crosswalk, but it's literally right across the street. You'll see the door is basically like a little bit of an indoor food court mall area.

Rachael Sack: Right. So, we will see you all back at 1:30. We'll have folks in the lobby a little before then to help bring you back up. And enjoy your time, your break.

Rachael Nealer: The room is unmuted, Rachael.

Rachael Sack: Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thanks for returning. We're going to get started. This just to review this afternoon. We're pleased to have Britta Gross joining us today on EPRI to give us a presentation. And then like we mentioned earlier, we're going to use the time right after that presentation to give you about a half hour to meet with your subcommittees to go focus back on cleaning up, finishing up the report.

Then we'll have some time for brainstorming, which kind of is an offshoot of our discussion with Chao right before lunch, where we can talk about what your subcommittee has planned to do and try to figure out how to coordinate, communicate, and especially thinking about the deliverables that might come out of some of those activities. And then we will round out our afternoon hearing from the public, around 3:30, and then wrap it up to look ahead to day two. So, Britta, are you on?

Britta Gross, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI): I am here. Can you hear me?

Rachael Sack: Yes, thank you. Do you want to introduce her or—

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, absolutely. So, we have Britta Gross here from EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute. Britta has been—I'm sure many of you know her probably very well. She's been in the electrification space for a very long time. So, incredible institutional knowledge with Britta. She made the transition from GM to EPRI just a couple of years ago, and she has developed a really amazing initiative, very all-encompassing.

Probably a lot of topics that we are also tackling as well, particularly around grid integration, but also even on the consumer education side, modeling and tools. So, we really wanted to bring Britta in to give an overview of the EV Scale initiative so we can understand how all of us can play in the sandbox together and where we can lean on each other's strengths and where this EV Working Group might be able to add value. So, with that, I will pass it to Britta. Britta, great to see you.

Britta Gross: Thank you. Same here. Thank you for inviting me here today, guys. Do you guys have the slides, and you want to control them? Or do you want me to share my screen?

Sara Emmons, Joint Office of Energy Transportation: Do you have the slides, Rachael?

Rachael Nealer: Yes, I can pull them up.

Sara Emmons: Britta, if you—well, there's a couple of ways we can do it. If you want to go ahead and share your screen, I will mirror it in the room.

Britta Gross: I'm sorry, you will what? Sorry.

Sara Emmons: Just go ahead and share your screen. Yeah.

Britta Gross: All right, let me do it. Hold on. Tell me if you can see my slides. And are they full view?

Sara Emmons: Give me just a minute.

Britta Gross: Yeah, are they full view or not quite yet? There you go.

Rachael Nealer: Not full yet, Britta.

Britta Gross: How about right now?

Sara Emmons: This was—just to be clear, Rachael, this was part of the issue that we were trying to resolve while everyone was at lunch but didn't quite resolve. So, we're just going to be looking at it.

Rachael Nealer: It's still not presenter, Britta.

Britta Gross: Really? It's presenter on mine. Let me try a trick. Hold on a second. Let me do what always is the first try when this happens.

Sara Emmons: In the meantime, Rachael.

Rachael Nealer: I've got it here.

Britta Gross: All right, let's try this. Tell me if you can see this better. How does that look to you guys?

Rachael Nealer: There you go. It looks great.

Britta Gross: All right, I know the trick.

Rachael Nealer: Thanks for going along with the punches, Britta.

Britta Gross: There you go. Hey, all—

Speaker: Oh. You can't have too much, Britta.

Speaker: Yeah.

Britta Gross: All right, let me plow through this. I think the plan was I would run through this really quickly at 15, 20 minutes, give you a sense of what this program is, especially to highlight the part that's relevant for what you guys are discussing and dealing with. And then questions at the end. So, maybe let me just plow through this as best I can here quickly.

I did join EPRI about a year and a half ago. And a lot of us from industry sort of came together at EPRI and have worked in this space for a long time, autos, trucks, fleets, utilities. And we have a sense of what was needed to address the challenges of getting to scale. Scale is a lot different than pilot projects. And so, we put together a program, about a year ago now, that identifies the things that are most going to affect, in our opinion, our ability to get to scale.

In particular, how it affects the utility industry. But of course, it's tools and process improvements that will impact and benefit fleet operators, manufacturers of the cars and trucks, charging providers, and so on. So, this is by way of saying, we knew there were some very large utility challenges, and we need to get our arms around them. First bullet on the left, there was an awful lot of alignment. But one thing that was different in the last two, three years is that there was a lot of alignment on 2030.

Goals by automakers, goals by the federal government, goals by even regulations in some cases, by a number of states, and even fleet operators, feeling a lot of either shareholder pressure or just they see the economic benefit of some of their segments of trucks. Second bullet, what is not clear and has never been clear, though, is the pace of action and investment that was needed to prepare the sites and the grid for that investment that's coming, the electrification projects that are coming, the charging stations that are coming.

The other thing that I've bounced up to—bumped up to this number one slide on the program is that third bullet on the left, because this has become such a pivotal and defining problem. It's already becoming an issue that is hindering the sale of early electric trucks, in particular, cars to some extent, but mostly trucks. And this is this timing mismatch between the time, time it takes for me to order a fleet of trucks, electric trucks, or a fleet of electric cars. I can get those trucks today. We're regularly, in this program, involved with Daimler Truck, Volvo Truck, Navistar packer. They can deliver trucks, a dozen trucks, electric trucks, in about four to six months still. But the utility industry has never been set up that way in four to six months to accommodate a 2-megawatt load, for example. In general, it takes 18 to 24 months. That's because there are a lot of moving pieces, a lot of other things going on.

And the number one challenge of utilities, the number one job of utilities is to make sure that power is reliable, resilient, now sustainable, and also, in many ways now, well, and of course, affordable. That means there's a rigorous process utilities use to make sure that, number one, the lights stay on.

So, at this, timing mismatch is a problem. It's a problem at scale. We thought it was more of a problem at scale. It is turning into a, actually, and also near-term obstacle. We're doing a number of things to address that too. On the right-hand side, what we knew and, knew to be true in the solution space, this would take extraordinary collaboration. It's bigger than EPRI. It's bigger than any NGO. It's bigger than even federal departments.

This would require, in particular, the three major stakeholder groups that are either regulated or mandated to make this transition happen. The manufacturers of the cars and trucks, the utility industry, and the fleet operators that are, in many ways, beginning to be regulated, if only self-regulated.

And then that knowing what we knew about data, where data is, what we can access, what we would probably have to share for the stakeholder groups to meet each other in the middle, we knew that we had to—we had to convey this need to be more transparent with what everyone's doing or we just aren't going to be able to get those 2030 goals.

So, with that preface, on this next slide, this is the only slide of the program on one page. In order to address those big gaps that are never going to matching 5,000, 10,000 fleets of 3,200 utilities to 80 charging providers out there, it's just going to take a couple, three pillars of activities.

The first pillar in orange is framing the problem with data. What, where, when are the loads coming, how big are they, and it had to be better than before. It has to be better than county data, state data, national data. We had to figure out where we could provide data at really an actionable investable level, which is really a feeder level for utilities.

We're not going to explain. I'm not going to explain that all means. But it had to be more granular than ever before because otherwise, we can just point fingers at the other utility in the neighboring service area or another fleet operator somewhere else. We had to get very tactical.

At column one, with transparency and opening up the books more and more, what are the facts? What needs to happen where and when? Second pillar, the processes that were designed for basically building loads over the last 100 years, but not for transportation. That's that timing mismatch problem.

There's also a little bit of reliability in here, but you guys are doing a fantastic job, the Joint Office is, in addressing the reliability problems. There are some things that EPRI is really well-equipped to do because we've been engaged in standards for a very long time and helped establish J1732.

There are some problems there that we think we can help. We're not taking on all reliability, all the working groups. We're not doing that. We are trying to create—we are producing some documentation that helps designers understand why reliability keeps failing. So, that's in the works.

But a lot of this is about the timing mismatch down below there in the green, the grid readiness. That timing mismatch. So, there's this system process reform, the stuff that wasn't designed for two megawatts, like almost anywhere in the United States showing up on a feeder.

Third column, we knew there was a need for new tools, maybe pilots, but really less about pilots. It's about tools that could unify these stakeholders together and enable them to help each other make better decisions, right size charging needs and understand where capacity on the grid should be upgraded and where the priorities really are, on which feeders, across the country.

Underlying everything regulatory oversight, there's no question a lot of this will land at the feet of some regulators, the utility regulators, to deal with some of the bigger questions about the speed with which we need to respond to fleet, timing, and charging infrastructure, timing needs. And then there's another workstream. I'm not going to talk about it all today. Equity and workforce are two other problems that we'll have if we don't think about this.

Very collaborative. None of us can do it alone, but we have really reached out to a lot of folks to get on the same page and almost make this too big to fail. I would just say, a lot of our learnings working on EVs for a long time, including one, were that, if all you do is do a skunkworks operation and keep it a secret, no one knows what you've done, there's no transparency, and we just didn't want to do that. We knew that this is like the one shot we have to get this right.

So, here's the advisory board. You can see Patti Poppe, the CEO of PG&E. She is the chair of the EVs2Scale2030 initiative. You see a bunch of utilities listed there. It represents the investor-owned utility segment, the public power segment, and also the rural segment. So, we made sure, again, that we have all three major types of utilities in this program.

You can see also there in green, the four major utility associations, trade associations. So, you've got the Public power immunities. Paul is there. You've got Kellen Schefter with Edison Electric Institute, the IOUs. You've got Rachael, also with SMUD, but also the chair of LPPC, the large public power companies, the largest municipal utilities in the United States. And then Angela Strickland is with NRECA, the rural co-op trade association.

You also see here, Katherine Peretick is a commissioner in Michigan, but also chairs the EV Working Group at NARUC. And then you've got three other stakeholders. John Bozzella is the chief executive of the auto alliance, essentially the vast majority of the light-duty vehicle automakers.

You've got Amazon as a representative voice of fleet operators that are very leaning in. And you've got Daimler Truck, the voice of large manufacturers with some particular obstacles in the near term that are helping us inform large scale issues. And then, of course you see Rachael Nealer here. With the Joint Office, we did not want to get out in front or behind anyone. We want to make sure that everyone's as engaged as possible, and that we're just cooperating and working together on this.

So, that's the advisory board. That's a top-down approach. The program was funded—generally speaking, we're still working on funders and stuff, but Amazon, a bunch of utilities, right now we've got a lot more non-utilities coming to join the program. They want to fund these efforts and see that it succeeds. So, there's more. This continues to grow now, but just to give you a sense of the breadth of excited participation in the program.

We did, again, in the spirit of cooperation and really making this too big to fail, who are all the folks doing rigorous analytics and load forecasting out there? So, we banded together with RMI, with the national labs. You see ATLAS, ICCT, and others in this list, who should we make sure is aware of what we're doing, we can open up data, we can make data available for analysis that we identify is really critical to perform right now, but who analytically should be aware, in particular, of what we're doing.

The bottom part of this is really key. I'm going to talk a lot about data today because we really—this is that transparency and meeting each other in the middle, these industries. So, right now, we scrubbed all the publicly or purchasable data sets over on the right-hand side. We bought everything you can buy. It's costly to do this, but that was the place to start. Start with where you can buy data, movement of trucks and cars, registration of cars and trucks, cell phone information about the movement of cars and trucks, et cetera.

So, we bought everything you can buy, and then we started working with the folks that had either telemetry information about the real movement of diesel trucks on the road today, gas cars on the road today, or also then for the near term and mid-term, what are really, what are the actual fleet electrification plans of fleets like Amazon, Enterprise, First Student, and so on?

Could we build an unprecedented data set with real, verifiable electrification plans, but also a long-term sight into what happens when all cars and trucks on the road today, cars, buses, trucks, on the road today go electric? So that we can put different lenses on. If we're talking to regulators, here are the near-term priorities with an eye to what's happening in the mid-term, with an eye to what's happening in the longer term.

So that we're making really sensible near-term investments knowing that, if we put 2 megawatts—build 2 megawatts of extra capacity on a particular feeder, are we done, call it a day, we walk away from that feeder, or in fact, in three more years, is there more load coming? And that's this need to drive more and more data to really understand the deployment plans.

A lot of our knowledge, of course, is what's regulated to happen, right, ACT in those states, ACF in those states, the new greenhouse gas mandates, and so on. We're going to be incorporating that into here soon too. But the data is really important. Let me show you some pictures of what that looks like.

Well, before I get to pictures of the maps that are already publicly available online, there were two things that were important to get right. I mentioned it before on number one. What granularity would be most useful to regulators and utility executives having to make decisions about where and when to invest in grid upgrades?

And we determined, working very closely with Uber, Uber has established, yes, Uber has designed a geospatial architecture system of mapping, and when you work your way down from hex 0 to 1 to 2, all the way down to hex 8, hex 8, we determined, was a really sweet spot for industry, because hex 8 is about 0.28 square miles of area.

Every hex is the same size. Every hex then, 0.28 square miles, is about the size of where a feeder, you can almost always identify which single feeder are we talking about. Sometimes two, but often which single feeder are we talking about here. So, we knew that it gave the utilities and regulators the granularity they need to know, what are we talking about on the grid.

It also was a way to obscure anonymize fleet data manufacturer data, because Daimler doesn't want Volvo to know its plans. I think Daimler—I don't know if Daimler is in the meeting here today, but Daimler doesn't want Volvo to know they're selling trucks to—Amazon doesn't want Walmart to know what's going on. A really important part of this process and program was to find a safe place for everyone to be willing to share the information they need to share that is not more than we need, but exactly what we need. So, that's what hex 8 does for us. I'll show you maps.

Layered approach means a lot of folks can help [INAUDIBLE] was with transit data. National labs can help us with ports and vocational fleets out there. We've got the WRI working on the school bus data for us. If we layer everything in, it means we can layer in Amazon data, and when Amazon has an update, we can strip it right out and replace it with the new layer of data. Everything was done anticipating growth, more data, more visibility, et cetera, over time. So, that's the premise of what's going on.

And if I quickly now, time check, if I quickly now just look at maps, so you can get a feeling for this. If you go to eroadmap.epri.com, this is available for you to now use. It's an interactive map. If you zoom into the United States, you see that it's in the title up there, hex 5 resolution.

Hex 5, and I don't have my reading glasses on, but hex 5 over there, I think the second to last blue arrow on the bottom, hex 5 is 98 square miles across. So, way too many feeders to be able to invest in, but directionally super interesting, right? You start to see what happens if we click on some of these sortable things and features over on the left-hand side. So, let's walk through what's in here.

Top arrow up there. Not on the very left, but up there at the top. Satellite view, we just released a satellite view so that when you zoom into a particular hex 8 and you're interested in seeing who operates there, you can just switch to the satellite view and you can see, are we talking Amazon, UPS, FedEx, both of them, all of them? What's going on in that hex? Why is there a hex popping up on the western side of South Dakota? What in the world is showing up when we get to full electrification or 2027 or 2024 or whatever?

So, satellite view. If we work our way down now, the arrows on the left-hand side, a timeline. We knew it was important to give heads up to regulators and utilities about when these loads are coming to the grid as best, we know them, and sometimes actual loads that are showing up like Amazon, Enterprise, et cetera, where we have real data and real electrification plans. So, there's a timeline you can click through.

I want to see 20, 24, 25, 26, et cetera, or I want to click the second arrow, which is a view of full electrification. When every known car, bus, and truck on the roads today is electric, what does the map look like? Third arrow, you can also sort by megawatt hours. You don't want to see a cluttered map of a lot of dots. I just want to see anything that's more than 20 megawatt hours a day, okay? You can just help zoom in on that.

Then we've got new layers we added recently. And here's the breakout of them in the fourth arrow but look over to the right. We started adding demographic layers for folks trying to do analysis, air quality concerns, EV charging station, locations. That's AFDC data from the NREL and EERE.

We've got hosting capacity. I'm going to focus on that in just a second. Where is capacity available on the grid to help folks like Amazon prioritize? Is it just time effective to go to Memphis first or Baton Rouge or is it Los Angeles? Actually, could we promote this ability to really see where there's capacity on the grid, which is more enabling of near-term efforts?

Justice40 census tracts are now loaded, transportation, disadvantaged communities. Truck stops are also loaded, that was data also that the DOE provided to us. So, that's the layers. There's a hex—the second from last bullet arrow on the left is what hex level you're viewing right now with also square miles. Hex 8 is the ideal. That's the one that's really going to tell us some good stuff. I'll show you in a second.

The last bullet is a lot of data. We are trying to be completely transparent, give away every secret. How did we aggregate, disaggregate? How do we create the model? What are the assumptions across the way? Help us make this better. So, we work very closely with NREL and LBNL and many others on this.
So, that's the premise, that's the tool. You can zoom into New York. I'm looking, again, here at a hex 5 map. I'm circled over there. Let's just take a look at Buffalo and Tonawanda in New York. So, I picked three dates 27, 2030, full electrification, that same area of Buffalo and Tonawanda. You start to see sort of priorities springing out, right? And by the way, this is a hex 8 map. Now we're looking at the 0.28 square mile dots.

So, let's just glance at 2027. What is that blue that pops up over there? Well, you can go hover over that. And you're told that there are 16 kilowatt hours used anticipated in 2027 at that hexagon, and we provide the breakout between light-duty and heavy-duty because the charging solutions are going to be different. And so, what you see here is that's a heavy-duty estimated load.

You pop up the satellite view and what do you see, who's operating in that hexagon? Amazon, FedEx, et cetera. No wonder that's some aggressive electrification going on. You know, I told you, Amazon's date is real. Those are real electrification plans where they plan to go. FedEx, we're working with right now. I think their date is coming very soon. So, this is, to some extent, really factual data.

If I just keep going, let's just look at the full electrification case. I picked the biggest black I could find in the Buffalo area. One hundred and four megawatt hours a day. Nine of those are for light-duty vehicles in that hexagon. Ninety-five, again, coming from heavy-duty. There is more light-duty vehicle load across the country, across all the hexagons.

Yeah, it's more pervasive. It's everywhere. But the ones that jump out are almost always heavy-duty loads, medium-duty loads, except for car rentals, which is why we actually also entered, a couple of weeks ago, all of the airport car rental loads based on some data we had from one of the major—one of the major car rental agencies.

Let me just talk quickly about capacity, because every fleet we talk to wants to see, well, where should I go first? So, there are 12, 14. Three are 14 hosting capacity maps online that are usable, and we're in the process. We've already incorporated two in the map, SCE and PG&E.

None of this is easy. I'm not going to tell you how hard this stuff is. It's really hard. It's why it hasn't been done before. But two host capacity maps are in already. We have 12 more to go. They're available. They're digitized. All we have to do is figure out, are we still talking apples and apples, and let's get them in the map.

So, we have 14 possible. We've got another 13 that are found online. They're the right data, but they're not digitized. And so, we have to go directly to the utilities and say, look, you printed a map of this online, but we need the data. We need access to the files. Can we work with you to get the files? So, we have another 13 possible, and so on and so it goes.

Here's what it looks like when you zoom into hex 8, Southern California. And you start to see feeder lines. I need to zoom in on all these things. Let's do that. Let's zoom into the Ontario Airport in Los Angeles and let's take a look at line capacity. So, I've grabbed—I've grabbed a feeder that happened to show FedEx and others. I should never do what I say I don't do. I should never really exclude FedEx, but it's FedEx and a bunch of other folks.

When I hover in that hexagon in a particular year, maybe it's electrification, I see that on that feeder line, according to Southern California Edison's hosting capacity maps of every feeder, its actual, every month, it’s updated every month for us, I see that today the, or at least within the last 30 days, the load capacity on that feeder line right where FedEx probably needs to electrify is, I think that says 4.5 megawatts. This is the power of these tools, and it just gets better and better with more information. So, let me—I know I got to power through this.

Next steps. Everything I told you today is energy. Does someone want to ask a question? Okay. Okay, let me just—I only have a couple more slides. I keep talking about energy. We know that's not as great as power, but power requires a much deeper understanding of load shapes, which means we have to segment the entire trucking industry and then determine load shapes for each of the segments. We're going to get there. The plan is to get there before September.

Temperature effects on the efficiency numbers we're using. Yes, we're working with the rest of industry to understand how should we be adjusting our brute force efficiency numbers. We took NREL's for now, but there's a better way to do that. So, we're going to be looking at that to understand a more finessed way to make sure that we're not overestimating or underestimating these numbers.

You see the utility service territory shape files in green. Hosting capacity for 14. We know we can get our hands on 14. They're already digitized. We see where the data is. We're going to get those in. Twenty-seven, maybe, but we got to ask for the—we got to ask for the data.

And then there are a number of others. We need a capacity—we need a proxy approach for the other 3,200 minus 27 utilities that just don't have even digitized data. What are we going to do for the rest? We have some theories. We have some research we're doing to see what we can do to estimate capacity across the grid. Data addition, school bus, another class 8 OEM is being entered, and then a lot of other additional data.

I will also—we're planning to add the new greenhouse gas, light-duty vehicle, and medium heavy-duty rules from EPA. Those are coming in as soon as we can get the files from, I think, Joint Office or DOE or EPA. And then we're in discussions with Joint Office and the DOE, Michael Zarabi. We'd like to get the freight corridors that were just released also into this. Again, so that everyone can see and be armed with load, capacity, freight corridors. How does all this stuff interrelate and leverage new solutions?

This is a quick way of just illustrating a utility process. It almost always starts, in fact, it always starts with that little gray box in the middle that says design and service request. That's usually how a fleet operator or Tesla or some other charging partner talks to a utility. You fill out the form before anyone wants to talk to you.

We have to fix this problem because that is when a fleet says, yeah, I got six months. My trucks are coming. And the utility says, no, no, no, I need 18 months or 24 months for what you're asking for. So, everything we're designed to do is to move that process way back to a vision queuing pre-service request phase. So, that's what we're trying to do by defining processes, tools, et cetera.

We're working on a grid fast tool that, imagine, is a secure online data exchange between all those folks with loads coming and the capacity on the utility side so that they can find each other. Amazon spent months, they tell me, trying to even figure out who do you contact at 3,000 utilities. We're going to put that data in here so you can find out at least who to talk to. That's the first place you start. Then you start looking at service request forms and how do we simplify those for the benefit of moving forward.

And then there's a policy outreach thing, 50 states. We're going to take what we know about the maps, make them personal for the state of Arkansas, West Virginia, Illinois, Florida. What do you need to know about lead times and the fleets that are showing up in your state and in what timeline?

And then the last slide here is just, there's a lot of online material you guys can go look at. I'll just suggest that the eRoadMAP is the most fun tool to go play and look at your neighborhood and see what's going on over here. I'll also point out that VPL, the Vetted Product List, is now another tool that we did because we're so familiar with the landscape of charging equipment, networking equipment, the standards that were there.

This was another one of our ways to clean up that landscape that was so confusing for even the designers of hardware. And so, we produced, very quickly on this program, a vetted product list. It now has about 550 pieces of charging equipment, like models of charging equipment or networking equipment that are vetted against industry criteria and NEVI criteria as well, the new NEVI criteria.

We also, that represent about 80 vendors of this equipment. The vendors love it because if we can coat the entire country, including all the DOTs, all the utilities to just rely on this list, vendors want to use this. They want to know that their products are getting attention, that there's a level playing field, that we're transparently showing who's got, who's UL safety, who's UL safety certified and who's not yet.
That matters. Some folks went to the trouble to get that notice to local fire marshals. So, we've put this data together. We're maintaining it as we speak and adding any other new vendors and working to enlist not only Oregon that's now using this officially, but the other 49 states.

And we're also working with the Joint Office to figure out, is there a way to scale this up faster, and then point to this as a tool that does the work for them. There's no risk on Joint Office part or anyone else's. EPRI's taking this on and we'll continue going through the effort to maintain and clean and scrub this landscape of charging equipment. So, that's a long way to say thank you guys for your time today. Happy to stand by for questions at the end.

Speaker: Awesome.

Rachael Sack: Britta, this is Raechel Sack, the facilitator. I'm just going to look to the group. Does anyone have any questions or comments they'd like to share?

Rakesh Aneja: Just a comment. This is Rakesh Aneja from Daimler North America, but I just want to continue to congratulate and applaud you and your team for the work you're doing. Been a pleasure collaborating with you certainly from a [INAUDIBLE] perspective, but also with the entire industry stakeholder group. So, keep up the good work.

Britta Gross: Thank you. I didn't embarrass you by saying you don't want Volvo to steal your customers.

Rakesh Aneja: Since you called me out, I figured I had to comment.

Britta Gross: Thank you. Thank you.

Rachael Sack: Yeah. Henrik then Nadia.

Nadia El Mallakh: Yeah, I just wanted to echo that, thanks, Britta, I think, from the utility perspective of what you've been doing and just industry, in general, really leaning in. And I know, in our subcommittee, the grid integration committee, we talk a lot about the work that you're doing. So, appreciate it, and just encourage folks that haven't taken a deeper dive into the EPRI work that EVs at scale that Britta is leading should do that when you have some time because it's a really good effort. So, appreciate everything that you all are doing there.

Rachael Sack: Henrik.

Henrik Holland: Hi, Britta. This is Henrik Holland. I'm with Prologis. We develop large-scale projects for medium- and heavy-duty truck installations. Really awesome work. A question for you on the capacity maps and working with utilities, and I can only imagine how challenging that is as you point out.
In our experience, the capacity maps aren't always as accurate or reliable as you would want them to be. Is that something you recognize, and what, if anything, have you done with your effort to ensure that those maps are up to date and actually useful?

Britta Gross: Yeah, great, Henrik. And by the way, you have an email coming to you real soon. Yeah, the commitment we've got from SCE and PG&E and anyone who wants to put their hosting capacity maps, they have to be updated every 30 days minimum. And so, I think we can do better. There are some, I think, it's, don't quote me on this one, guys, but I think it's SCE that actually does these almost daily. But what we're getting into the data set is going to be the monthly one.

You're right. If I'm a utility and you come to me and you want that 4 megawatts I just showed you on that, wherever, that was Ontario Airport FedEx, if J.B. Hunt swoops in and claims it, here's my service request, I want all 4 megawatts, there is a problem, right? And I may not know that for 29 days. So, we have to deal with that. That's always going to be a risk, but knowing that there's 4 megawatts and not 0.5 or knowing that there's 25 megawatts and not 4 is super helpful as a starting point.

Nothing we're doing, by the way, and Nadia can just double down on this comment, nothing we're doing ever replaces the discussion, the communication on that you have to have with the utility. But it is directionally as good as data as we've ever seen anywhere, and we're determined to keep making it better.

So, that's sort of the commitment we are making. That it's got to be good and we won't put data in here that's suspicious or suspect or just not updated. That, yeah, stationary—and that's the problem with those other 13 facilities. That it's online. It's published in a report somewhere and not digitized. And that is already suspicious for us. We need to see that real process.

Michael Berube: Britta, like Michael here, I just say, one of the things we're trying to do is, working along with group, is talking about how do we create a standard format for that. One of the things that someone said, boy, is there like a standard format we could have? And then you could actually—because many districts don't have it. They don't update it. It's all over the board. And then we could actually have much better data.

We have gathered, for the first time, all the maps that do exist of any quality in one location and published that, but I think that's the type of thing that could be recommendations coming out of this group, right? Is this is a key enabler? This is something we need. This is something that to be standardized at a certain level and it's actionable. It actually is something that could be done and could help.

Rachael Sack: Okay, one more comment—

Speaker: Yep, go ahead.

Rachael Sack: Sorry. We just have one more comment and then we can hear from you and wrap it up. But sure, you want to ask your question and then Britta can respond to both.

Sharky Laguana: Sure, go ahead. Britta, echoing everybody else's comments, what a great presentation. What amazing work you're doing. I just learned about some stuff over lunch and I guess I have a question. I know it's early days, but do you contemplate also mapping microgrid or off-grid power sources or supply?

Britta Gross: Tell me how we do this. This is one of the challenges, right? I mean, I want to reach out to Prologis because they have a line of sight. They have established properties, and they presumably have a deployment plan, like, where do they think charging is going to be most needed so we're going to invest in this at this site or this location?

It's challenging for others, like charging companies, and I think it's related to your question. It's challenging for other folks that almost respond to market signals, like, where is phase one funding from DOE or Joint Office or whatever going to go for the freight corridors? There are going to be a lot of people responding to that answer, but less determined. They're not really in charge of their own destiny, right? They don't want to just build stations. They're looking for the incentives, et cetera.

If you can help me understand how I could know, years in advance, not four weeks, how do I know, years in advance, that that's a solution that we could map in here, I'm happy to discuss that. I will tell you that, because of this interim power problem, just getting trucks to fleet yards and kind of hindering it because the grid's not ready or the charging equipment's not ready, we are going through a very accelerated study of interim solutions of which that will be documented.

What are the things? What are the case studies? What can you point to? What is Tesla always do when they implement a station? What does EVgo always do? What are their solutions so that we can maybe start to whack away at permitting hold-ups and utility holds-up where just there's lack of understanding, they don't see the repetition out there? So, that's something that's coming too. So, help me understand what we could do with DER and other off-grid solutions. I'd love to know more, what you think we could do there.

If I could just go back and talk about Michael's comment. So, you're talking about, yeah, standardizing hosting capacity maps, very good point, Michael. I think that was Michael talking. I will say, we did start with the DOE list. You guys had a nice list of 40 to 50 maps out there, and that's exactly what we assessed.

We went through, determined which ones are actually not related to EV load kind of stuff. They're just DER. They're DG, distributed generation maps. It's for the solar industry. Some of those can't be used for that reason. The ones we did find, some are digitized, great, not digitized, okay, we got to go ask one after the other utility. So, we're going to—I've already fed that information back to the DOE and Joint Office so you guys know what was in that list you published, because we've gone to the trouble to understand it.

I will say, we are also aiming to standardize service requests or at least a pre-service request. This is a long-standing complaint. It's really difficult to do. We're going to take it on. We've got some CEOs of utilities that say, okay, we get it. We will get some ambition behind this. And you guys can go to the work, but we'll have some stakeholders that actually want to make this happen. So, we're going to top down that one too and then come up with that standardization. So yeah, any time you guys poke at and find opportunities for standardization, you tell me. But that is the goal here, everything for scale.

Rachael Sack: Great. These were excellent questions. I think the group is very engaged, learned a lot, already knew some of what you shared. So, I think this is an excellent way for us to transition to our next agenda item. So again, Britta, thank you for joining us and thanks, everyone, for coming.

Britta Gross: Great. I'll check it out. Bye, guys.

Rachael Sack: Thank you. All right, so with the energy from that presentation, we're going to move on to our breakouts, just 30 minutes or less. You can find a room. We've got one right here, another conference right next to it, and then a group can stay here. So, let's have grid integration right across medium heavy-duty right next to it and charge it stays here and come back next please.

Rachael Nealer: And the goal—and the goal is a redline version of the section of report, such that everyone, at the end of the day or tomorrow morning before coming back together, is able to quickly review, see the updates, feel comfortable with it to then go into the vote. You're cleaning up and refining your sections. Okay, we'll see you in 2:45. Thank you.

Rachael Sack: Just in, getting ready with the report. Let's just kick in real quick. And we're back. Are we off mute?

Speaker: We are now off mute.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: Yes. If you can hear me, can you confirm that you can hear us? Okay.

Speaker: Yes, that sounds good.

Speaker: So, are we good?

Speaker: Just one moment.

Speaker: Christin, are you able to hear us okay?

Speaker: Are you able to hear me now? It's probably—it's probably my tab.

Speaker: Go ahead. I'll ping her.

Speaker: Show that little mute thing.

Rachael Sack: So, just checking in with each of the groups. Is there any group that is not finished reviewing your comments and making—okay, all groups are good with your final edits. And if we go back in and look at the comments, are there any—have all technical comments been addressed? We would just be doing an administrative cleanup.

John Bozzella: Yeah, I would think that's right.

Can I just—I'm sorry John. I think one of the things—by the way, I should express thanks to the rest of the EV Working Group because your comments were really helpful from the report out. So, thanks to everybody. And I also want to thank Andy and Sharky and Crystal who were simultaneously.
But anyway, I think the short answer to your question is yes, but there are a couple of things that I think the working group has to consider, right? We didn't identify them as questions. But to give you an example, we took on public education, but it's a very, very broad statement. So what degree, for example, should we scope that, right? So, I'm assuming that's part of what tomorrow's about, right?

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, I mean, I think we would like to be inclusive with the priorities report, and then the next steps would be scoping out what our next steps on those priorities.

John Bozzella: Okay, got it. Okay.

Rachael Sack: Michael.

Michael Berube: Rachael. Yeah, thinking about our time, this is a very high-level report, right? it's been forever on it, but probably it's not meant for that. Is the plan then, tonight, to—will the staff team or the staff go through and create a clean version for everyone to look at tonight and say, here's a clean version, take a look, this is what we're voting on?

Rachael Nealer: We're going to send a clean version and a redline version, and the redline version—or the clean version is just going to be the cleaned-up version of the redline. But it depends on whether you want to review the clean version or the redline version for your review. We'll provide both of them tonight so that you can review it either overnight or in the morning before we get back here, although it is a little bit of an early morning tomorrow.

Michael Berube: So, in theory, the clean version would be a ready to publish version? There are probably some grammar things and all that. So, someone will be going through that this afternoon.

Mark Dowd: What if we have suggestions?

Rachael Nealer: We are no longer taking them, Mark.

Speaker: Especially for me, Rachael knows you. She knows, everybody knows.

Rachael Nealer: Troublemaker. No, I mean, meaning when you take a look at it, if there are suggestions, that maybe you weren't in the subcommittee that was discussing, that you see some updates, I would say let's identify—it seems like everyone is relatively comfortable with the draft that we have. So, I would say, maybe make a note of it, and as long as it's not like a, “I don't want to publish this unless it says X, Y, Z,” let's put it in the parking lot for maybe some of those scoping exercises of how to build out the next.

Mark Dowd: Yeah, I was only, Michael and I were talking, just taking a look at it from a tonal perspective. That's all I was thinking.

Rachael Sack: Yeah. Yeah. And I think when the clean and redline changes version are ready, we'll save them and huddle, but let's also email it to everyone since I know not everyone has access at this time. Okay, so target, do we think dinner time? We want to give you time this evening to look at it.

Rachael Nealer: So, we end here at 4:15. I feel pretty confident that we can have something cleaned up by 5 p.m. mark, and we'll get it in your inboxes. So, I would say sometime between 5:00 and 5:30, you should receive the report to do the final review.

Rachael Sack: Great. Okay, so before our public comment period, we want to move to our brainstorming topic. And Sara, if I could ask you to move, I think, it's probably slide 12.

Rachael Nealer: I just moved. So, we should be in order now.

Rachael Sack: Great. So, given the momentum of the discussions so far, especially with the report and your updates, we wanted to talk a little bit about what are those things, those tangibles that you're going to be working on to come out of your subcommittee. We won't worry yet about when they're getting submitted or how formal they're going to become, but Rachael has a nice slide that we'll pull up here to talk through what those options can be or see what other ideas may be there, and also in thinking about the collaboration.

So, I guess while we're pulling this up, maybe I could just start with Huddle for a second. So, I know it's not a perfect process. So, our goal is to get everybody access in whatever way is possible and I noticed some of the groups—Sara, can you go back? Thank you. One of the groups—different groups are using Huddle in different ways right now.

So, it is really there for your choosing of how you want to use it. But I do think as you learn more, have presenters, have ideas, want to remember things to bring to the next working group meeting, that, that space is there to be that parking lot for each of your groups.

And if you want to encourage others to go and see what you're doing, whether if you want to have meeting minutes. I, one of the groups has meeting minutes for every meeting. So, that's up to you if you want to do that for your group or have other lists. So, we're just here to say this is a great tool and the collaboration will be important since we are big group, and you're going to be doing a lot in between the meetings. Do you have any particular things, whether it's—

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, I think there's a couple things at the larger EV Working Group level that we want to discuss. We don't necessarily—the last meeting we didn't have this collaborative workspace set up, but I do think we want to have a bit of a parking lot perhaps for ideas, but also for presentations.

So, in preparation for this meeting, we sent, circulated an email that said, hey, here's our draft agenda. Give us your feedback. Let us know if you have any additional presenters. But I think over time, we want to build up that presenter repository basically, so that if you see a good presentation in between meetings, you can put it on the list and then we can start seeing how these topics are shaping up.

And so, it's not always this push-pull because, let's be honest, using our emails as G lists is not effective. So, making sure that we have that space to build out the presentation repository so that we're providing you guys really good fodder at each meeting to think about and to formulate opinions. I think there should also be maybe a parking lot ideal one. Perhaps there's even one of different subcommittees requesting things of other subcommittees.

So, going back to an idea that I had suggested in the last meeting, is this idea of iterating between the subcommittees, and a design and engineering team cycle where you might have to iterate very closely on a problem or a product. And so, I think what I had heard in between the last two meetings has been, what are the other subcommittees doing? How are we going to feed this back into the EV Working Group?
So, I think we want to also explore how we solidify those feedback loops using the collaborative workspace, but also using our time in person. But maybe we also have report outs of subcommittees in advance of the next in-person meeting or—I think there's just a lot of open questions and ways that we could take this. And so, I want to put it out there for people to weigh in on because this is your EV Working Group to make recommendations to the government.

So, I don't want to have too much of a heavy hand, but I want to make sure that we're providing you the support that's needed to deliver on some of our goals. So, maybe I'll pause there and see if there's anything around maybe the collaborative workspace folks want to propose, and we can make sure that between this and the next meeting, we build out some of that structure.

Rakesh Aneja: I agree with all of your comments, and I think that's necessary for us to discuss. The additional one I'd like to add for consideration is some sort of an integrated project plan timeline. And it doesn't have to be super elaborate or anything, but just even key activities and milestones.

Certainly, we are in different phases of maturity of developing that, and the subcommittees will come up with their priorities and timeline. But then how do those connect with the other subcommittees, right? If we are waiting on each other's information or even if we're not waiting, how can we benefit from each other's information? That high-level integration would be super important. What do we want to accomplish, for example, by December 24th of this year?

Rachael Sack: John.

John Bozzella: Yeah, so I mean, this may build on that comment. To me, I mean, when I'm looking back at the notes of our subcommittee discussions, there are two areas that I think, from our discussions, are ripe for collaboration. One is metrics. And because there aren't just—the metrics are crosscutting. How do we, and I mean metrics in a macro sense, how do we know if we're on track, right?

So, Rachael, you said 50% light-duty EV share of market by 2030. A whole bunch of things have to happen that aren't happening today in order for that to be a reality. How do we know if we're on track? We're not going to wait until 2030. So, the metrics thing, I think, is ripe for collaboration.

And the second is interoperability, right, because it, by definition, crosses boundaries, right? So, it isn't just between the vehicle and the charger, right? I mean, it goes all the way back through the grid or the micro-grid or whatever and all the way through to the customer's data, right? And so, when you think about that, that customer’s financial data all the way back to the grid, that kind of interoperability is significant.

Speaker: And just to clarify, John, I think when you say how do we know whether we're on track, you mean country is on track moving forward and not whether the committee is on track.

John Bozzella: Correct. I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, right. That's why I was referencing Rachael's concern, whichever version of the goal you want to or aspiration you want to—

Mark Dowd: Do you have that from the light-duty?

John Bozzella: Do we have what?

Yeah, I think we do. Yeah, that's not the question. The question is the difference between—

Rachael Nealer: Our dashboard.

Speaker: Yeah. So, for example—

Speaker: [INAUDIBLE] where we.

John Bozzella: Yeah, so because inevitably, and you know this as well as I do, there's going to be a gap between the reality and the, whatever you want to call it, the regulation or the goal or the aspiration. So, the question is, how are we determining—how are we measuring that gap because how we measure it will help us to figure out what we need to do to act or to mobilize or to educate or to, whatever it is we need to do, whatever the verb is, right?

We were having, Henrik and I were having this conversation on the way back. I don't know how to define the metric that identifies the gap between the vehicle market and the charge—and the number of chargers publicly available. I don't know what it is. Do you?

Mark Dowd: We're doing it.

John Bozzella: What's the metric?

Mark Dowd: We're trying to do that for the federal fleet, and it's very hard.

John Bozzella: Very hard, right? I'm not challenging. What I'm saying is, if you have the answer, we'd love to [INAUDIBLE]. But there isn't there. We don't know what it is.

Speaker: There isn't an answer.

Speaker: There's simplistic.

Speaker: Level, yes.

Speaker: Correct.

Speaker: It seems like we would benefit also because you can suffer from being overloaded with data. We really want to narrow it down to the minimum number of things that we're analyzing whether it's—

Speaker: Variables.

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker: They're KPIs. They're not everything.

Speaker: Right. Right. But easy to get overwhelmed. So, like that KPI of chargers for vehicle, chargers per population within a geographic area. But we're not going to be able to capture everything, and we're implicitly going to be leaving a lot of things out when we develop our KPIs to figure out what are the KPIs that are most representative where we want to be.

Speaker: And I'm only speaking for the light-duty sector now. I think they are the ones that are most transparent to the customer. Yes, there are the ones that are most transparent to the customer. So, we already know what the problem set is. We just don't know how to define the metric.

Rachael Sack: Ruth, do you have yours?

Ruth Gratzke: Yeah, I have a couple additional comments. Can you hear me?

Speaker: Yes.

Ruth Gratzke: Okay, good. So, first of all, thank you for that presentation. I think that is wonderful, very educational. We need more of that. So, I assume that's what you're talking about with a central data depository. So, that would be great. In terms of horizontal topics, I think workforce, to me, also screams synergies between the three different groups that we're having here. That's maybe also something to think about as we start sharing best practices, what works in certain pockets of the country, and maybe then talk about that.

And the third thing is, we talked a little bit over lunch here when we had our subcommittee from all three subcommittees here. Do we need to prioritize? Because we are at risk of boiling the ocean because this task is humongous. And if we can get a better handle on the home chargers on the private vehicles, maybe that's the area where we say, hey, let's measure impact here. And then destination charging, maybe there's different metrics and different progress rates that we can determine versus trying to do everything at once. So, just something to think about.

Rachael Nealers: How are people feeling about how their subcommittees are running? Are there any tools that we can give the subcommittees? What I'm thinking too is maybe there's—you want to nominate someone, maybe not the lead of a subcommittee, but someone on the subcommittee to cross-pollinate to other subcommittees. So that we're not working in silos. Because I'm thinking to myself, we've got all these great subcommittee notes. We can circulate them before the meetings, but that's much less dynamic and interesting than actually being part of the conversations.

So, do we need to have maybe EV Working Group getting back together fully for report outs in between the meetings? Do we want to have a couple representatives that just cross pollinate, because the burden of getting everybody back together is finding the right time and all of that might be challenging if we're going to increase our meetings?

The other thing that I want to—I think Ruth had a really good point about presentations. So, we have three lined up over these next two days. What is the right type of balance for meeting in person, or I would propose that we might want to do alternating virtual and in-person meetings. And so, how do we want to structure those to get the most out of them? Do we want some of those to be more presentation heavy? Do we want some of them to be more—

Luckily, we're not going to have a report to review and vote on every single meeting, right? So, we'll have some more space to learn, investigate, propose new ideas. But what do you guys think is the right balance for all of those things, because we all are volunteering our time essentially? So, how do we get the right number of inputs so that you guys are feeling comfortable about formulating your recommendations and then making a product out of it? All right, Danielle. Thank you.

Danielle Sass Byrnett, National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissions: So, I just have a question about, I mean, I can only speak for myself, but serving on two of these advisories and there's multiple subgroups on each one and I have a day job, is there a way, maybe the group will agree with me, is there a way that one of the, whether it's Joint Office or one of the designated federal folks who is participating in the subgroups could actually provide that liaison?

So maybe—I'm going to use an example, all right? So, Rachael, you jump on, you're on our call, and in the first 10 minutes of the call, you're giving a strategic update on, okay, here's what happened in the grid subcommittee. Here's what they're looking at. Here's what happened on charging. And it's not just a rundown of everything. It's, here are the key priorities and the elements that might be of interest to your group and vice versa.

And then that way we get that information, but we don't have to be the ones participating. Unless people want to and have the time to support that, but personally, I know that would be hard for me. So, I just wonder if it would be—that can be part of the support that you guys give?

Rachael Nealer: We can absolutely entertain that. I do know—so I have been invited to the regular medium- and heavy-duty working subcommittee meetings, but I know that grid integration and EV charging have been meeting, I think, without any federal representation outside of the membership, whether it's me or any of the Volpe staff that are supporting. Do you think that's helpful for someone that is seeing this at a broader level, like, pull in things? Do the people that haven't had that, do you feel like you're lacking it, or?

Speaker: It's a way for us to prioritize the information that we provide you. So, you don't have to necessarily be on a call. We can have our meeting. We can bubble up what we think are, whatever those categories are as ours are the same for each subcommittees, and then give it to you integrate and then you redistribute. That will take the burden down a little bit.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah. I mean, I think that's good. I do think there's an important context piece of being in the discussion, and we have staff here to support. So, we would want to take it back and come up with a bit more of a proposal. But if you think it's within the realm of possibilities to have some more administrative help in the subcommittees, that also can help cross-pollinate the ideas and themes that are occurring.

Speaker: Yeah. I think part of what Rakesh was bringing up would be a really good complement to this as well, at what point are we getting close to milestones, and where we anticipate needing to sequence with the other subcommittees. I also wanted to ask, from a respondent to your logistical questions, would it be feasible to get a calendar of some sort into our Huddle space so that something like our every other week grid integration meetings can be on there with a Zoom link and anyone who wants to join us can do so and other folks as well?

And then I think we were going in this direction, so I'll just say it out loud. When the subcommittees invite someone to brief us, extending that invitation to all of the working groups so that there's an opportunity to leverage those connections and also have a place to save the presentations, of course.

Rachael Sack: Thank you. Nadia, and then we'll work our way down the table.

Nadia El Mallakh: So, I do think some type of cross-pollination makes a lot of sense whether that's supported by the Joint Office or some members. We were talking about that at lunch too, otherwise we risk silos. Also, I think, as the committee leads, we should probably try to think about how we get together maybe quarterly or some cadence. But definitely support that.

And the other piece is, I think when these were first, the groups were first created, we put people where they would logically fit. There may be an opportunity to open it up and say, well, I know you might, logically, be in grid integration, but maybe you join the medium-, heavy-duty to mix it up a little bit.

So, that's just a thought, because you probably have a lot of minded, like-minded—so for instance, Danielle and I, you're on the regulatory side on the utility side, but we're probably going to generally understand an issue, spot similar things. Maybe there's some mixing up, we could think about doing. That's it.

Rachael Sack: All right, we'll start with Michael and work our way down.

Michael Berube: So, I'll actually just hear from the other members first. I have a broader comment I want to make.

Rachael Sack: John.

John Bozzella: Okay, so lest the charging network subcommittee is considered somehow vaguely or specifically anti-government, I just want to be clear. Alyson's been in our meetings. We have had, I don't want it to—I don't want to sound like we don't care, but seriously, I do think you make a good point. I think we should, we should include you both in our agenda setting and in our meetings, and what you can make can't—I do like the idea of offering the meetings to others.

And so, whatever that posting idea is a really good one because we would certainly welcome, as we do in this full committee, anybody who wants to participate. I think it would be helpful if you saw our agendas in advance and you might say, that's an interesting conversation I want to plug into. So, I think we can, or I can, as a subcommittee chair, commit to being a little bit more transparent to the full committee about what the agenda is, potential speakers, and those types of things. And that would allow for the others to join.

I'm not quite sure what to do about the collaboration thing, whether it is—to me, we should identify, and I think you said this, right, the idea that we should identify—there's a couple of key collaboration projects that we should identify and then figure out how, across the subcommittees, to actually staff.

Rachael Sack: Thanks. Sharky?

Sharky Laguana: It's actually factor question. At what point is quorum established and it has to be a public meeting? And then second is there any rules around in serial? Like I know, in California, we have the Brown Act, and what you're proposing you might bump into some legal constraints if you create a quorum in serial, like so-and-so talks to so-and-so? I'm just curious, just making sure we're in compliance with the [INAUDIBLE].

Rachael Nealer: Thank you for that. I will take that question back to Chao around—my guess is there's probably a specific number or a percentage of the membership that needs to be together in order to pass. Okay, so pass. So, the fact that we have three subcommittees divides us into thirds. So, unless more membership shows up to a specific agenda—

Speaker: If I can restate that. So, I think if—I think you're saying that, if other attendees from other subcommittees raise the level of attendance of the EVWG to 50%, then we ought to have a little bell go off and says, now we're an EVG, Electric Vehicle Working Group meeting, and not a subcommittee meeting.

Speaker: Twelve or 13, 25 in total. Twenty-seven.

Speaker: There's also a secondary concern here, which again, I don't know if it exists, in fact, regulations, but you can have what's called in-serial meetings, which is, even though you all four of you or all 50% weren't in the room at the same time, still more than 50% communicated in a way that is a violation. So, in California, if a commission I'm on, if the four of us of the seven got together and talked about something and it was just two of us talking to two others in two separate instances, that would be also a violation. So, I just want to check in on that.

Rachael Nealer: I'm unfamiliar with that regulation. So, let me go back to challenge and see if there's anything specific that we need to.

Speaker: We always find the hardest way to do everything. So, you're usually pretty good.

Rachael Nealer: And what he's describing is still different than if you had a presenter and everybody ended up wanting to listen. But as long as you didn't deliberate.

Sharky Laguana: Yes, right. That is exactly precisely right. You can all attend a presentation, but you can't deliberate.

Speaker: But that—if I could—because I was just thinking the same thing Sharky was doing and trying to figure out whether I wanted to bring it up or not. But it also seemed like when Chao was talking, that ongoing participation in subcommittee meetings by somebody that's not a working group member seemed to me to be a little—

His answer to one of your questions around that seemed a little, I don't know, in my mind it seemed shaky. So, if you could ask that too. His response was, well, as long as you're inviting multiple different organizations and so forth. But if you're coming every committee meeting, that seems to be a slippery slope.

Michael Berube: In other words, if you have staff, people that are helping you all the time on your staff to review if you're having worked a lot with Chao and others like, what's the appearance you're giving? Are you like, some person’s getting an outsized voice in the process and someone else is being caught up. That's the core—

Speaker: Of every meeting. I wonder if that's—

Michael Berube: I mean, it depends if they represent a unique stakeholder view that's not somewhere else.

Rakesh Aneja: I didn't interpret that way that they have to be in every meeting. My interpretation of that comment was that, let's say, if we need an external consultant view on whatever particular topic, then we do want to give that opportunity to multiple counsel, not just go into that one person all the time. But that doesn't mean now that consultant or other ones have to be invited to all meetings. It's a special presentation and we ask maybe one person, a one-time person be, or company be a second time. That's how I—

Michael Berube: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker: Denise.

Denise Gray, LG Energy Solution: Just real quick. Just wanted to comment on two things. The first one is the work plan that Rakesh and a number of folks have been talking about. I think as we establish from top-down and then subcommittee up, I think that's going to be very helpful because it will provide us a pace of topics to really work on and where the interfaces are.

I'm an engineer. So of course, I always find my interface documents and who’s my inputs and who's my outputs. So, I think that will help us. I think, organically then, participation in the various committees for knowledge gaining, to make sure that our deliverables are complete and concise, I think will normally happen.

The last topic around virtual meetings. I love virtual meetings because quite frankly it takes, some of us from California, takes a while, and I love virtual meetings, especially if they're topical. If we all say we need input on X, and quite frankly, because of our work plan, all of us need to be knowledgeable so that we can do that and then bring in that expert to provide counsel to everyone. And we'll let you do the regulatory on what we can say and what we can't say, but the main thing is that we get the information. I think would be great.

And then lastly, having, on Huddle, a place for external presentations. And that's all has to be, external presentations. So that folks like Britta—because as soon as I get on this workgroup meeting, I saw Britta and I go, you'd be really great here, and all of a sudden, you guys have her here. So, I think we're all like-minded on data that we can use in order to help us to get through those items.

Rachael Sack: So, keeping an eye on the time, I wanted to talk about—

Speaker: I want to just raise up one little—

Rachael Sack: Yeah, hold on one second. What this all means for keeping it in the back of your heads for your working sessions tomorrow. We'll briefly, after we hear from Michael, go up one more slide just as a teaser. But I think all of this is to help you as you're figuring out your time tomorrow, two hours.

To help define, what are the presentations you might need, what are your milestones that you see most time sensitive, and plot that out. And I think that'll make it even easier to put a calendar together to show a milestone map or diagram. So anyways, this is all to help you for tomorrow. Michael, what would you like to share?

Michael Berube: I would say, listening to the conversation really good. It does strike me that one of the things we're getting at a little is like, what are we trying to get to? I mean, a lot of the answers to the questions really depend a lot on what is it we are trying to create as a group. We're not trying to create three subgroups to have subgroups to just talk, right?

So, when you think about it, as a federal advisory, the power of this group is to give advice or recommendations. And so, as someone who would be receiving that, with the secretary, it's like, what are the recommendations of the group? What's the power of what we can do?

So, I think, as the groups think about this, I think where, going over tomorrow to, we got to really think. So, we should leave here from this meeting today, tomorrow with what is it we want to do. Are we saying, okay, we want to come up with, by this date, roughly this date, a set of metrics we can suggest about?
We don't have to wait till the end to make all the recommendations. We can be making recommendations every three months if we want, whatever this group votes on. But what is it we collectively want to come up with as recommendations? We want recommendations on these.

And we got to get pretty quick here, saying, look, we already know—we think there's recommendation on four or five topics over the next few months. Existing workings, just divide them up, illustrate who needs to work together. But we don't need with that. I feel we're going to just have general conversation and we'll be nice, but we won't really.

Rachael Nealer: Sara, can you move on to the next slide? I think this is a good segue. And I know we're supposed to have a break right now, and I do want to make sure that we're sticking close to the public comment time. That's supposed to start at 3:30 just because I know people are counting on it to show up virtually. But I'm just going to throw this up on the board. This is something that I promised you guys, is the spectrum of products and processes that we could offer as the EV Working Group.

So, I think there are some things that are small, narrowly defined in scope, relatively short, that we can turn around, that maybe answer specific questions or offer feedback on something. An example is, we're going to get tomorrow a presentation on the zero-emission rate strategy. There's a whole document supporting that. Would be great to get EV Working Group recommendations specifically on that feedback for the zero-emission rate strategy for example.

So, there's a couple examples there on how another committee within the Department of Energy does some of those. Then maybe a short report. This is the priorities report that we're working on, right, something that's a little bit longer than maybe a short memo.

It could really vary in the kind of scope, whether it's narrow or a little bit larger, but again, I think that's probably months to years depending on the scope. And then you have something more comprehensive, like an NAS type of report. I'm hearing a lot of talk about inventories of things. That might be more of a comprehensive report that we want to build over time as we're uncovering all these different resources.
So, one thing I want to point out, though, is that even with the priorities report, where we had a relatively short report, which thank you all for your dedication to reviewing it and making it our first product in a really good product, but I think the long pole in the tent of all of this is going to be that we have to publicly deliberate all of these recommendations, right?

So, we're going to have to put in the federal register notice, at least, 15 to 30 days in advance. So, I think the map, the roadmap, is a really great idea because then that allows us to support it administratively. So that we're continuously working towards these milestones, whether it's a memo that we feel confident can be turned around in a relatively short timeline or whether it's a comprehensive report that it's going to take us a, much longer to do.

So, I'll just leave that there for now, and we can talk about it a little bit more when we come back from our short break because the public comment period is about to start at 3:30. So, short break for folks. We can talk more about this tomorrow as well. Thanks, everyone.

Speaker: I'm sure you got a lot of different choices. Eventually you'll go.

Speaker: Yeah.

Rachael Sack: Okay. This time, we are going to open our public comment period. So, as a reminder, this is the first of two sessions, with the second public comment period taking place tomorrow afternoon. For the public that would like to participate today, please raise your hand if you've pre-registered to make a public comment and would still like to do so. You can do this by raising your hand within the—using the raise hand icon.

I'll call upon you, at the time, to speak and you will have two minutes to share your comments. When I call your name, please be sure to unmute yourself and turn your video on if you would like to. And then, when we make it through all of the pre-registered commenters, if time allows, we can ask others if they would like to comment. And we'll go through this for the next 30 minutes and see who would like to participate.
All right, at this time, please feel free to raise your hand if you're interested in providing a comment. And again, you'll have two minutes when we call on you.

The first hand I see is Q. Washington. So, if you could please unmute yourself, and if you'd like to turn your video on, please do so. And you can go ahead and speak. Thank you. Just make sure you are unmuted, for Q. Washington. You'll probably have to unmute yourself. We'll give you a second.

Quinten Washington: Hello. Can you hear me?

Rachael Sack: Yes. Hello.

Quinten Washington: Yes, my name is Quinten Washington. I'm the president and CEO of Quintessential Construction Managers and Consultants. I'm also a member of the Greater Washington Region Clean Cities Coalition. My question is with regard to Justice40. What subcommittee does that fall under within your working group? And also, second question is, who is the representative in your working group that is the advocate for Justice40?

Rachael Nealer: So typically, we don't answer questions in the public comment. But just because we have a forthcoming report coming out that will detail this and we've discussed this report in the meeting thus far, equity is one of our crosscuts across our subcommittees.

And so, it is going to be represented as a key pillar and important piece of the work that is produced by each one of the subcommittees, and then the overarching working group. So, Justice40 will be a portion of that equity crosscut, as would various other equity issues. So, Justice40 is among them.

Quinten Washington: Okay, thank you.

Rachael Sack: Thank you. All right, at this time, are there any other public attendees who would like to raise their hand to provide a public comment?

One more call. If anyone would like to provide a public comment at this time, you can raise your hand in teams.

And as a reminder, another public comment period will be held tomorrow afternoon. Okay, seeing no hands raised. We're going to close the public comment period. So, we will mute again all attendees and thank those from the public that are joining us. Again, if you have a comment, tomorrow afternoon will be the next opportunity.

Okay. So, at this time, Rachael, I look to you. Next on our agenda is to talk about next steps, preview tomorrow. A large portion of that in addition to the technical presentations is time for your subcommittees to work through your plans and ideas for the upcoming future. So, are there any particular things you'd like to highlight, Rachael?

Rachael Nealer: Yeah. Thanks. I think we had a really robust discussion around some ways that we might be able to start coordinating, collaborating with each other more closely. I would love, Sara, if you could go to slide 17. This is just our overall roadmap of legislative deadlines for the EV Working Group. There you go.

So, we are in the ongoing EV Working Group meetings every 120 days. The January 2024 report is the one that we are looking to vote on tomorrow. And then we have the next report due December 8 of 2025. So, just reminding people that this is our overall legislative schedule, but I'm really interested in working together on how we build out a more detailed roadmap of, now that we have members, now that we have all these great perspectives, all this brainpower coming together, what we do want to prioritize.

And I think that will be a really great conversation to have tomorrow in the subcommittee because one of the important things about the subcommittee breakouts tomorrow is this next step on, we've pulled together this priorities report, what's the next step on scoping out what we want to do next in the subcommittees and as an EV Working Group. And there's a really important piece at the end of the day tomorrow where we report back to each other.

So, we are kind of mimicking what we are hoping to happen over time with subcommittees continuing to do work, but also reporting up to the EV Working Group membership so that we can all weigh in. So, I think this is a unique opportunity for us to, now that we've spent a little bit of time looking at these products and knowing the process a little bit better by going through this first report, like, how do we want to prioritize some of the initial priorities that we have in the report?

So, I would say, tonight think about those numbered items on the priorities report as you're reviewing them. Also think about the subcommittees that maybe are not involved in that you want to say, I really like this number three in EV charging, but I'm in the medium- and heavy-duty electrification. So, like how do I plug into that? So, I think this is just our chance to start building out that roadmap, what those milestones might be and what that timeline might be that fits into this kind of overall timeline.

I can also, tonight when we send around the report, put in it the product and process slide that I have because it does have all those examples. So that you guys can also peruse, especially as we're reviewing our report, look at a couple other examples from other committees. Any questions? Yeah.

Barak Myers: What we wanted to touch on through here is, so on the planning committee for the National Transportation and the Indian Country Conference, it's the largest tribal transportation conference. And lots to—well, we want to try to have some more EV things included within our agenda, trying to get those things on there to be working with your office to bring some of that. But also, we have, I guess, maybe some sort of presentation done or update on the work that we're doing.

So, I guess that would be just, what would be the official, I guess, process for that, because we're, right now, sending out invitations? So, would we just reach out to the executive director and request, say, do an invitation, because obviously, we were talking about doing certain presentation things? So, don't want to overstep.

So, we know, obviously, the secretary's office and some of the appointments, you have to do formal invitation and go through the whole forms and all the things that you have to do. For me, that would just be something, because I think it's a thing that, and it'll go a long way with the public.

The public education piece in which we have discussed is, I think, for the tribal communities, in general, is a thing of trying to understand the whole EV thing and the funding, and could you say something about an Electric Vehicle Working Group, like, what does that mean?

So, it's just, it's a piece of getting that education out there so that people are more aware of things, and then possibly getting more participation as we move forward. And I think when you speak, a lot of times, about tribal communities, it's very similar to rural communities as well.

So, it's like the metropolitan areas were way out in front and we're trying to play catch-up now. And that's been the case for years, it's just, it's nothing new. And I think that's part, when we talked about, in our subcommittee, about a local government kind of penalty box, if you will, for that, that goes a long way, especially in rural America when you're talking about electrification and home charging and then just having grids built out and other things.

So, that's something we want to try to do. I'm trying to push that to try to include things on the agenda as we move forward with that. So, I just send that to the, I guess, would we send the invite to your executive director? Would that be the proper way or does it—

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, you can send—you can send the invite to myself, the executive director. We'll make sure it lands in the right place for you.

Barak Myers: Because I think our Shelbi been our point of contact for Marlo and I, but we want to expand that out.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, that'd be great. And maybe, after the event, if there are specific things, maybe having you on the agenda, coming back to the EV Working Group and explaining to us, sharing some of the themes that you're seeing, I'd love to see some of that cross-pollination, because we've got a lot of great people that go out into the world and conquer EV meeting.

Barak Myers: A lot of the people here too be great because we have the opportunity to bring in the subject matter experts in different things. So, this group would be—some of the information would be very crucial when we're talking about things, because again, it's a new world to Tribes when you're talking about electric vehicles and electrification and grids and levy and all this other stuff. It's kind of like, what are you talking about?

Rachael Sack: Right. So, are there any other comments or questions regarding what Rachael was sharing for our path forward or observations from today? I have four. Before we wrap it up, for our public members that are still on, I want to give one more plug for a comment period.

If you'd like to submit written statements, they can be sent to our working group's email address, which is evwg@ee.doe.gov, or you can send it via mail to Dr. Rachael Miller, as described in the Federal Register notice. And any statements received by April 13 will be included in our meeting notes from this working group meeting.

Anything else you want to cover before we adjourn?

Rachael Nealer: Nope. We will be working now till the end of the day, 5:00 to 5:30, to deliver you guys a clean copy of the report and a tracked changes copy of the report for you to review for our early morning tomorrow. Sorry, Sharky, we only got you today, but it's 8:30 tomorrow morning. Hopefully, you are getting a little bit. But then we will do a vote at the, not at the very beginning, but shortly after at the beginning of the day, was to close out the report and finalize the processing. All right, great.

Speaker: Thank you.

Speaker: Thank you all so much.

Speaker: Thank you.

Speaker: Thank you.

Speaker: You're welcome.