Meeting for the Electric Vehicle Working Group - June 2024 (Text Version)

This is a text version of Meeting for the Electric Vehicle Working Group - June 2024, presented on June 17, 2024.

Rachael Nealer: Another minute or so for folks to join and make sure that their audio and video is connected.

Ruth Gratzke: Good afternoon. Good afternoon.

Rachael Nealer: Hello, hello.

Ruth Gratzke: Small group today, huh?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Rachael Nealer: Hey, folks and a number of public participants, thank you for joining. Seeing people sign in here from the membership. You're now connected. All right. Well, thank you all for joining. Let's go ahead and get started.

We always start with the most exciting part of the EV working group, which is that the meeting is being recorded and will be published on the EV working group page within driveelectric.gov. If you do not wish to have your voice recorded, please do not speak during the call. If you do not wish to have your image recorded, please turn off your camera or participate by phone. If you speak during the call or use a video connection, you are presumed to consent to recording and use of your voice or image. So, if anyone has already started recording—so thank you, and big thanks to the NREL and Volpe folks for all the support getting this meeting ready. And I will go ahead and pass it over to Rachael Sack.

Rachael Sack: Hi, everyone. My name is Rachael Sack. I'm with the USDOT’s Volpe center and your facilitator for today's meeting. Nice to see everyone. Since our last meeting was in person, we'll just refresh everyone's memory for some ground rules for our virtual meeting today.

As always, if you have something to contribute during our discussions, feel free to raise your hand during the discussion, and I'll do my best to work with my screen to call on you and certainly ask my colleagues to help with that as well. And feel free to mute when you are not talking. And certainly, if you are participating and speaking, we ask if you're able to, to please put your video on so that we can see each other.

For those who are joining us from the public, we will have some direction during our public comment period for raising your hand to participate during that portion of our meeting today. So, I think this sets us up to just review the agenda. Before we dive in, we'll spend a few minutes hearing updates from Gabe and the Joint Office and then spend the majority of our time together hearing from the subcommittees themselves. We want to know what you've been working on since our last meeting. And we know you have some topics that you want to address with the larger group. We'll also have time for some Q&A amongst the committee members for each subcommittee after their specific updates.

We'll have a small break during the course of this afternoon's meeting and then spend our remaining time talking through a few discussion items. Rachael's going to set us up through discussing how to prepare for some initial recommendation memos, so looking at some bigger questions that we think this committee can help provide some answers to and pose some good information that can take the shape of some initial deliverables before we prepare for the next significant report. And then as time permits, we know there's going to be a few items to keep discussing based on what you'll be sharing in your subcommittee updates. So, we hope to be able to dive a little deeper into the KPIs and metrics, for example, and perhaps you'll identify some other things that are for discussion, if not today, and subsequent subcommittee meetings or for our next full committee meeting.

And then as we typically do, our last portion of the meeting, we'll have about 25 minutes for any public comment. At that time, we'll ask the public to raise their hand if they would like to participate during that session. So that takes us through our afternoon for today. Rachael, do you want to just remind us all of the mission of this group and revisit our charge from the Secretaries?

Rachael Nealer: Absolutely—thank you so much, Rachael. I just wanted to take a few minutes here at the top as we go into the updates from the Joint Office and then the updates from the committees just giving a little bit of a preview of what I'm hoping that we can discuss later in this meeting, really focusing in on the Secretary's Charge that we're here to develop goals, metrics, and actionable recommendations for industry and government to collectively reach our goals of electrification here in the US.

And so, what I would like folks to really focus in on as they're listening to these updates, in particular, is how do we get to those actionable recommendations? We had some discussion about this in the last meeting, but we also had just published or approved our last—or our first report, which was also our last report. But how do we start looking towards what the next recommendations will be?

And so, I'd like people to really focus in on if there are some low-hanging fruit questions that would allow us to quickly, as a group, come up with some recommendations that we can all agree upon and run through the initial recommendation memo process, something that's relatively, I would say, small in scope that we can get some consensus around without a lot of background research, that we can deliver in a short drafted one to five page memo, that would go directly to the secretaries with some recommendations.

I would like to really try to set a goal for ourselves of actually developing the next agenda around approving such a memo, whether that's one memo from one of the subcommittees that's able to identify one of those questions early or whether that's more than one subcommittee that really wants to focus in on it. I will say that all of the subcommittee recommendations do need to go through full membership approval as well, just as a reminder. So, if we do go down the path of each subcommittee coming up with some recommendations that then come up to the overall membership, just recognize the workload that, that might be not only drafting, but also reviewing all of those for the full membership.

But I really want to start proving out how we can get some of the process working for us so that we can quickly get recommendations on specific issues that we deem are important and whether we want to have the secretaries also weigh in or some of our other colleagues be able to come to us. And then we have a better idea of how long it will take us to develop those recommendations, process them, review them, get them approved by the full membership, and then have them ready to deliver.

So, that's really, I think, something that I want to use the time up front just to get people in the right mindset so that as they're hearing these updates, they're thinking, OK, could we relatively easily turn this into a recommendation? And I have some proposals towards the end on the house side. But I want you to be thinking about the—what side as we hear these updates. Any questions? All right. I will then go ahead and pass it on to my colleague, Gabe Klein, for updates from the Joint Office.

Gabe Klein: Great. Thank you, Rachael. Appreciate that. And thanks for all of your hard work on this. And I really want to extend thank you to everybody who's in the EV working group. And we talk about this regularly. We're super excited. We're excited about the first report in terms of what we're going to focus on. But we're very excited on moving towards real recommendations in the future reports.

Here in the Joint Office, I'm just amazed actually at how much activity we have going on. We're still growing and hiring up. Great example of a recent hire would be Matthew Gaskin, who came to us from DDOT in D.C. He was their deputy director for the D.C. highway safety office. He was also the air quality coordinator there. So, we're continuing to build the expertise in the office, both public sector, private sector, NGO.

And at the same time, as we look externally, sales continue to rise. I just saw figures today from this—from May, I think we had a 30%-plus increase in hybrid sales. Over the last year, over 3% increase again in PEV sales. So, while things have are flattening out in some ways, which we expected, they actually are continuing to have a nice, steady ramp. We see the announcements from companies like IONNA, who chose Durham, North Carolina, as their HQ. And they stay committed to 30,000 EV chargers.

So, I know people are probably focused on Tesla and the changes over there. I just want to mention that what we're hearing from industry is they are super excited. They're growing. And any gaps that are there, they will—they're more than happy to fill. And we are meeting weekly with companies, both new and existing, in the space that tell us the same thing over and over.

The NEVI program is hitting its pace. Ohio opened a station last week. Last week, Maine announced 17 locations. Every day there's literally an announcement about either stations opening or RFPs closing. So that's been great to see. The CFI and RAA—or actually just the CFI in 10% programs were combined to put out $1.3 billion a few weeks ago to continually ramp our corridor and community charging efforts. And those are grants, obviously. There's 523 million that will be extended to first round applicants that were not successful. You may remember we had billions of dollars in applications and $623 million for the initial tranche. So, that will give that effort a boost, we think, quickly.

On the technical assistance front, we are full bore. We're up to over 50 people working behind the scenes on the contract and consulting in lab side, supporting our growing team to work with states MPOs and now cities and towns as well on the implementation of these programs. So, we have webinars, for instance, tomorrow on working with rural utilities. And then we have a webinar next week for zero emission freight strategies and educating people on what this ZEF strategy is and the four phases and then how they can utilize it in their plans. We've got a NEVI guidance that came out from federal highways to the states last week through the division offices.

And so, yeah, I mean, there's just a tremendous amount happening. I could spend 50 minutes, to be honest, just talking about what happened in the last week. We had the largest festival that was, I think, ever held worldwide with our team last week where all the OEMs and the charging companies come together and actually test their equipment. And our standards and reliability team came away energized, no pun intended, because there's so much energy behind this idea of plug-in charge, public key infrastructure, which we are working on, so everything from test harnesses and all of that to adapters being certified to vehicle to grid progress and plug-in charge, which we think now is going to happen faster than we thought before.

We have a open source platform that we've partnered on with the Linux Foundation. And we're super excited about not just the partnership with such a reputable foundation focused on open-source software tools to support the communications between the charging infrastructure and all the other systems and vehicles, but how much it's being embraced by the OEMs, by the private sector. And that's what leads us to believe that we could reach a national plug-in charge infrastructure much sooner than we thought. So, more on that when we meet next time.

You can read also about a lot of this. We've really made our website a hub for everything that we're doing. And we're actually in the process of revamping it to make it even more usable and friendly. But I am going to put a link in the chat to the news section. And I would encourage folks to look at news, but also look at webinars and recent publications.

Just in the last few weeks, we've put out battery energy storage, help sheets for electric vehicle charging stations, grid constraints, fast charging sites, how to use batteries as buffers. And we've also got hot weather and cold weather impacts on transit buses. And next up, we've got the same help sheets coming for school buses—so, a lot of different pieces of information there that we think will be very usable. And we've also got a playbook, which we announced a few months ago with four modules, but we've got four more modules coming. And that will include contracting and procurement, which is obviously a very important consideration for our stakeholders at the state level and at the MPO and city level. There are videos. There are benchmarks and case studies and more there.

And then we continue to talk. And you guys may talk about this as well, about, how do we raise consumer awareness? I see Michael there. We talk about this a lot. He's passionate about it. And as you all are working together and talking in your groups, love to hear what you're thinking over time on how we create more awareness, how we myth bust, how we let people know that EVs are a solid purchase for them, and that they are not going to encounter huge problems utilizing EVs just as they don't with ICE vehicles. And in fact, they can save considerable costs.

So, anyway, that's what we've been working on. That's a bit of it. And I'm going to turn it back over to Rachael and Rachael. But again, thank you all so much for taking your valuable time to work on this with us. We appreciate it.

Rachael Nealer: Awesome. Thank you so much, Gabe.

Rachael Sack: OK. So, at this time, we are going to turn to our subcommittee updates. And just as a reminder, I will pull up our membership here.

So, first, we're going to hear from the Grid Integration Group. I think we'll start with Nadia and then hear from a few people with the medium- and heavy-duty group and then last but not least, the charging network updates. And like I said, we'll have time for 5 to 10 minutes of 10 or so minutes for Q&A after. So, if you have questions as we're hearing from the subcommittee members, you can certainly just take a quick note, and then we'll open it up when they conclude. So, Nadia, I'm going to stop sharing my screen so we can hear from the Grid Integration Group. And I believe the focus will be on the managed charging and the inventory activity.

Nadia El Mallakh: Correct. Thank you, Rachael. Good morning or afternoon, depending on where you are. We have been busily following up since our last in-person meeting and are looking forward to sharing some updates. Rachael, as you noted, those are our two big areas, but just big picture, we have identified some areas that we would like to focus on this year. One of those is managed charging. And we'll talk about that in more detail.

We've also spent some time gathering some information and better understanding timing mismatches and the need for certainty. For example, timing in an interconnection request and how we can help support there. We have looked at bridge temporary solutions. Gabe mentioned storage, on site storage, but really partnering with others in the industry to think about what are some best practices there and then finally thinking a lot about codes and standards, of course, that can apply to a variety of use cases. But we know that there are other subcommittees that are focused on the network and also focused on the unique needs of medium and heavy duty. So, we've also been thinking through this vis-a-vis things like multifamily, housing, and the like. And so more to come on those fronts, but just wanted to share that context.

And I know my colleagues will talk a little bit about KPIs and how we're looking at a standardized framework. So, we believe that's very important. So, I'm going to defer to them to give you a couple of ideas and suggestions. I think Henrik can't make it today, but I think Dean and John will share some highlights there. So, with that big picture background, let's jump into managed charging, and then we can save a little bit of time for the inventory related that we're working on, basically pulling together some inventory of existing information on grid integration. So, with that, let me start with managed charging.

And, Michael, I know we've been coordinating, and I think you're going to provide some additional context. But just as I mentioned, the subcommittee did identify managed charging as a key focus area this year. We know that it's a big piece of the puzzle, especially as we're thinking about how to most efficiently use existing grid infrastructure and help where possible not have to expand the system and rely upon having some certainty there. So, I would note that we have been working with others, of course, including DOE. And we're excited that DOE is looking at—Michael will chime in on this—an industry-led forum to help address some of the barriers that we're seeing to date on the technology, customer, and overall scalability model.

So, while we have had pilots where we've learned really what we hear consistently, and I think what a lot of us, probably folks on the call and, of course, on the working group have experienced, there's been some challenges to really get to scale and do it in a way that's very consumer-centric, easy, low friction, and really thinking about keeping it simple to start with, so the basics of vehicle to grid integration. And so there, with that, let me pause and see, Michael, if you want to chime in now and share some highlights. I'm happy to keep going, but I know you've been working on a lot of good stuff. So let me know if you want to chime in.

Michael Berube: Sure. I can—I'll add a comment or two. So, for the full committee, Nadia led a series of discussions just with many members of the subcommittee, whoever could make different points over the last few months where we reached out to stakeholders across the spectrum. And I'll translate some of what I said in my words because just, I think, this is really important. Two key things that we have heard is barriers for us to be successful at EV adoption is we need more investments on a number of things related to the utility side of bringing power to charging and not as a barrier but an advantage of EVs, we need to keep the costs low, the economics work for consumers. So, those are two critical path items.

As we talked with people, there was a continued interaction of basically the thinking of—two, to make investments, you need the people making the investment, and you need public utility commissions most of the times approving those investments. There's a lot of—since we are for—I think many of you know, but for those that don't, we're entering a new period in the grid that we haven't been at for decades of growth in the overall net growth and load. We haven't been there, which means—net growth means more investments.

And there is certainly a valid concern of if you make those investments, how do those investments get paid off? Especially if the payoff of the use is down the road, so how do you avoid pressure on rates now? So, commissions are hesitant to approve investments, unless they know they'll be downward pressure on rates. Utilities are hesitant to make investments, unless they know there's payoff ultimately.

So, one of the things that can help with that is if you have managed charging combined with those investments, it can help keep downward pressure on rates and help people be more comfortable in approving those investments and keep downward pressure on rates, which is one of the key goals. That's the thinking of why this becomes a classic linchpin type issue.

To Nadia's point of convening, one of the other things that came up in a lot of discussions with folks was that we need to start moving to scale. And to move to scale, we need to get alignment between entities that ultimately would need to send signals of when manage charging needs to happen, like, when do you need it? Which is really the utilities so you know when these loads need to be managed. And then ultimately that needs to get in a consumers—it has to be in a form that ultimately will affect the charging decision.

And that requires then, we believe, as one of the key pathways, the automobile, the OEM, who Nadia is managing that vehicle, getting that message, and be able to translate that message and deal with the consumer interface. That requires there has to be agreement and alignment on and enough volume to make it all worthwhile. And it has to be low friction because otherwise you eat up any of the savings you get in the friction of the cost to do this. And it has to be low friction from the point of view that you need relatively high numbers of consumers to participate. Otherwise, you don't get the benefits of managed charging.

We have had experience—Gabe has mentioned our work on the ChargeX Consortium. Back a year and a half ago, we had conversations with the many different players across industry about interoperability and said this is a going to be an existential threat. If we don't figure it out, we at DOE get help, bring a place to convene people through the national labs, and they can provide that expertise if industry is willing to come and kind of work through those challenges. And that's worked really well.

So, we envision a similar conversation here where probably through some type of national lab consortium, being able to pull together the people who have done the demos, have the information would need to test and how you implement it to start moving from individual one off programs to truly large scale that could be implemented. It takes a while to get standards together, maybe an SAE, or an ISO, or something like that comes in and actually puts the communication IEEE. There'll be someone like that will be need to put a communication protocol in place. But we need to start now so that we can have it in place, let's call it, a year from now so people can then start factoring it into products so that three years from now, there's actually starting to be enough volume to make a difference. I'll pause there.

Nadia El Mallakh: Thanks, Michael. That's helpful. And I think we are well aware that managed charging is quite a broad category, and there's different definitions. Again, I think the philosophy is let's start with some of that standardization, the foundation we’ll need for scaling. It doesn't have to go into version 2.0 immediately. But I think that it's—we're seeing interest in coming together and leveraging and understanding what we've learned from pilots, et cetera, in the past. But really, how do we take it to the next level? And that foundation and standardization is really going to be key for confidence across all sectors and industries and to make it a simple experience for customers.

And so, yeah, I think we're excited. We're aligned that this is going to be a big focus area, so more to come. But I think that was helpful context and obviously going to be a key component, too, of getting that scale to make it reliable and predictable on the utility side as well as for the other players.

Michael Berube: But one other quick comment, Nadia, I think neither one of us mentioned, but I—because we're so into the conversation. What we are talking about here is really is exclusively level two charging and really home level two charge [AUDIO OUT], to be clear, because we're not talking about on fast chargers, which by definition, are there to be fast and what people want to feel right when they're plugging in? Think about the overnight level two largely at home or down the road. There'll be solutions for people that aren't plugging at their own personal home but yet charging overnight where you have basically the capability to shift time shift when that charging happens.

Nadia El Mallakh: Right. Yeah. Excellent point, Michael. All right. Well, thank you. I don't know if anybody else—I'll keep giving, just to stay on track, our updates. I don't know if anybody else on this subcommittee—chime in if you have anything else to share. But I'm going to transition to inventory. And you can always, I think, raise your hand, and I'll see you.

On the inventory, so what we started doing, just as a subcommittee—this is just the subcommittee working—was really looking at, hey, we understand that there's a lot of great existing work out there on grid integration, whether that is a study, or it's data, or tools, or some combination thereof that's either published or in process. And that can be from the public sector, private sector. But we really wanted to start just having a very simple inventory that had the basic details and data, like what is it? It is bounded by the fact that it's supposed to relate to grid integration, but is it a tool that you can use? Is it a study that's come out of some entity or perhaps a national lab? And then where can you find it? And briefly, just a brief description of what it focuses on.

So, for example, it might be something related to managed charging. It might be something related to grid integration and some of the unique needs we see for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles and the like. So, what we have done is put together an initial list. And I want to thank the subcommittee members and some other partners, like EEI and EPRIX, who helped us put together the initial population and, of course, the Joint Office. We've got an initial list.

And so, for working group members, you have in your inbox an email that outlines, hey, we'd like you to take a look at this and make any additions. We have a link for you in the materials. But the intent will be over time that this will be a living inventory and then hopefully at some point it's something that's published through the Joint Office.

But really just to get our arms around, what is the universe that's out there? So, it's low-hanging fruit, but we thought it was important to just have an organized location, centralized location. So that's it on the inventory. And as I mentioned, on KPIs, we're really excited because I think overall the working group is going to have KPIs. And, again, you'll hear more about an initial template we're looking at. But I think even for the working groups tearing up to that and understanding where we go, where we go from there. And it looks like Sharky may have—be chiming in.

Sharky Laguana: All right. Just a quick question. Is this email going to all working group members, and has it already been sent? And if so, who should we be looking for it to be sent from?

Nadia El Mallakh: Yes. It should be going to all working group members. Julie Nixon sent it this morning, so hopefully it's in your inbox. If you don't see it there, let us know, and we'll make sure. And it has a little more detail and then a direct link into the document. So, our goal would be to have this finalized within—by the next, say, three weeks or so. And then it can be a document that we all have. And, again, this may be something that over time is helpful as a public-facing document. But at first, we wanted to just get something for us as informational for us as working group members. OK, thank you. If there's nothing else, I will hand it back over to Rachael.

Rachael Sack: Great. Thank you. Does anybody else have any questions based on the updates you heard from Nadia and Michael or anything you want to mention from your own subcommittee activities that they should know about because there's some linkage there? So, anything anyone wants to bring up right now? John.

John Bozzella: Yes. Thank you. So, Nadia, thanks for that. Very helpful. So, on the managed charging, I love this focus given how important level two home charging is to the current EV market. It's just two questions. One is you briefly mentioned pilots. And so there are states that have already managed charging pilots out there. Is there an opportunity for the working group to look at some sort of summary of what's working and maybe what's not working with regard to the pilots? For example, I understand, in some states and some service areas, there might be an incentive for a customer to join a managed charging program, for example.

And then to Michael's point about communications, it would be really helpful, I think, for—and a nice potential overlap with the work we're doing in the charging subcommittee to understand I think managed charging a little bit better. So, we'd love to know your view about how far along you are in terms of looking at those pilots and getting a point of view. And then the second question goes back to your point or Michael's point about PUCs and PSCs and how important they are to implementing them.

Many of us are engaged with public utility commissions and public service commissions in this space, generally. And I wonder whether there is something, a set of principles or—I'm not quite sure what it is. Maybe it's principles that we can agree to support collectively as we're engaged—unmanaged charging as we're engaged with public utility commissions, public service commission. So, sorry for the long question.

Nadia El Mallakh: Great questions. I'll jump in. On the first point, yes, that's actually something that's come up about similarly inventorying what's out there on the pilots. There have been some good lessons learned. But really the next point is how do we scale this. And you want to also understand what's been done to take it to the next level.

So, I believe actually—and, Michael, you may have or, Rachel, you may have feedback on this. But I know, I think there's actually some ongoing work to do some of that inventory. And I know there are some existing studies, so we can definitely make that an informational gathering objective. And I've heard that come up as a next step. So, John, I think there would be support around that. And it's my understanding that that's starting so we can take that back.

On the second point, there are some best practices out there. And you're absolutely right about the critical role of the regulator. Whether that be an IOU or a city council, if it's a municipal utility, et cetera, we need to have those kind of best practices. And I know there are some out there. I know there have been a lot of—there's been a lot of research done and studies out there, including like BET. But let's also pull together what's out there.

And I think this future effort to really think about the technologies, what's needed to scale the foundation, if there can be alignment—I think there would need to be alignment of vision around what are some core principles and buy in there—that I think is going to be necessary to be successful, so 100% agree. And other subcommittee members chime in if you want to.

Michael Berube: One thing that—oh, go ahead. Go ahead.

Rachael Sack: Well, Michael, do you want to just finish the thought on John's question then Sharky?

Michael Berube: Yeah. I think, John, what I'm hearing in there are some good suggestions around how do we take where we're at and formulate them into recommendations at the full committee can consider, a guiding set of principles based upon the lessons learned. I threw on the table there this process that we suggested that might be something that we could put in the form of a proposed recommendation to the committee in terms of pulling together different players. So, I think that's very good thoughts.

Rachael Sack: Sharky.

Sharky Laguana: Yeah. Unrelated to the inventory question, Nadia, but a question I have is, is there any sense—I've seen a lot of stuff in the press about data centers consuming more and more of the grid's resources. And when I think about inventory, I think about our overall capacity and resources.

And I'm curious how the utility side of this is looking at resource allocation, whether there's an opportunity here for one sector to maybe gobble up resources than another sector. We're competing against each other for the same resources. Is there any conversations around that. And maybe it's too early to talk about that. I'm not trying to pin anybody down, but just trying to get a sense of whether we think this is going to be an emerging problem or not.

Nadia El Mallakh: So, you raise a great point about always keeping in mind that the electrification of transportation is one growing use case on the grid. And this all has to come together and be harmonized. So, whether it's low growth from data centers or other forms of beneficial electrification, like buildings, or thinking about even overall system health and asset renewal, a lot of our Western states and some components of the country are dealing with system hardening to deal with wildfire concerns or more extreme weather. So, any sound utility planning practice is comprehensive.

And you have to look also at integrated system planning—so, not just the distribution system, but what does it mean for transmission? What does it mean for generation, electric generation? And then some utilities are dual fuel. So, the natural gas system—if customers are moving away from natural gas, what does that mean for the demand on the electric grid?

So, all of this, I think, holistically raise an excellent point is being looked at. Varying utilities have different requirements and different planning horizons. But overall, it is part of sound planning practices. So, I think even in that inventory, there will be some components that look at more holistic views. But that is going back, taking it back to something like managed charging.

That is a great example of where there's so many different pieces of the puzzle. How do we bring some concrete certainty, those guiding principles, some recommendations to the full EV working group, with which hopefully can be adopted, and then that helps solve those puzzle pieces. And others are working on those other groups. So, excellent point. That was a long-winded answer of saying amen to what you said. There's a lot of pieces but know that that's part of the comprehensive planning.

Sharky Laguana: Appreciate that. Thank you.

Rachael Sack: Great. Any other questions for the Grid Integration Group?

Nadia El Mallakh: Rachel, just note one last thing. Going back—and this is in our first, the first EV working report. We had added some other cross-sections to grid integration. So, affordability, speed, and data are always there. And so, we're thinking about all of those, too. So, going back to just what Sharky was saying, it's balancing all of these components, thinking about those crosscuts and, of course, our larger about equity workforce. And I'm drawing a blank on our third one at this exact moment. But those are all going to be things that we're looking at. Thanks.

Rachael Sack: And it looks like one more hand raised. John.

John Bozzella: Sorry. I just forgot one other thing, Nadia. I'll go very quickly. In your comment about affordability reminded me of a question I wanted to ask, which is that if you look at affordability in the light duty sector perspective from a light duty vehicle perspective, it's about the vehicle itself and, yes, a little bit about the cost of the charging. Your notion of affordability goes to how much it costs, like, what's the ratepayer paying both the ratepayer that's supporting electrification that might not be a customer as well as the ratepayer that might be an EV customer?

And I wonder whether we should be looking at this idea of complete home energy and whether that's something that might be a topic. And it's probably not a near term thing, but might be a topic for us to discuss that might spur adoption. So, in other words, I put the electrons I need for my transportation and the electrons I need for my home and everything else in one bucket, and I pay once. And it might even be like a cell phone model. I might even get the device.

And so, I just wonder whether that's something we ought to be—to what degree utilities are thinking about this? Or what degree the subcommittee might be looking at this? It might be helpful for us, again, in the light duty sector to understand a little bit more about how you're thinking about that.

Nadia El Mallakh: Yeah. I want to be sensitive to time. I'll just say really quickly, I know in the past—and I know it's definitely on the radar of the utilities—when you think about the total energy wallet, what somebody is paying, that's really critical. And so, I think you're absolutely right. Like in my past role, we were looking at trying to put very clearly on the bill, how much you spent towards your charging because it was the equivalent to about $1 per gallon of gasoline. But your overall bill, electric bill, is going up, but it's actually your coal pocket energy pocket. What you're spending on energy is going down.

But to your point about affordability, we kept it vague because we also wanted to understand that really from a consumer standpoint or a customer standpoint, the whole picture has to work, the cost of the vehicle, the cost of any infrastructure, the energy, all of that. So, I think it's a great point. And we'll make sure we focus on that. And thank you, Rachel, for reminding me of the third crosscut supply chain. I don't know how I could have—supply chains been so front and center. But, yeah. So, great point. We'll take that back. And we'll coordinate with you and your subcommittee on that, John. Thanks.

Rachael Sack: OK. Any final questions or comments before we move on to our next group? OK. Well, thank you very much, Nadia and Michael. And thanks for the questions and follow up discussion because all of these things do have these dotted lines to each other, and especially the crosscutting areas as well. But these subcommittee updates are to help us think through how these relationships can meld into those recommendations that we introduced earlier that are the ultimate goal of this group moving forward. So, let's turn it over to Dean and company for the medium and heavy duty subcommittee update. I understand there is a few presenters here. So, we'll let you guys kick it off. Thank you.

Dean Bushey: Thank you, Rachel. And thank you, John and Nadia. And I would completely agree with the inventory piece there. There's obviously lots of pilots going on. There's lots of initiatives going on. And I think that's one of the ones that our subcommittee highlighted that we should capture and understand the great work that's going on both in private industry and government industries and make sure we incorporate that in some of the recommendations we've put forward.

So, briefly, we're going to go over—our subcommittee meets about once every other week. With some people have been on vacation, so it's been a little tough. We pulled in some outside experts for those other committee members. Those presentations are available on Hudl. We pass them on to Rachael, and they're posted. We also meet cross subcommittee, John, Nadia, and I and anybody else is welcome to join. We meet once a month to make sure we're synced on some of the efforts. So, it's been very, very beneficial.

I'm going to give you a quick update. I'm not going to—Mike's going to give you a quick update on the state of the industry. We just last month in Las Vegas had the advanced clean transportation exposition. Really, honestly, there's been a little bit of a shift. And you'll get Mike's take on where we're going with the electrification and hydrogen vehicles. Lots of truck manufacturers are out there, and lots of charging providers are out there.

There are obviously medium duty, heavy duty. We have unique needs. We're going to hit the grid pretty heavy. The grid needs to be ready. There needs to be initiatives. To make those grid enhancements and make sure we work with the utilities, we need to make sure the total cost of ownership for the fleet owners is there and they can get some initiatives from the government. And then we're going to talk about KPIs quick. We're going to get through these pretty dang quick. So, with that, I think, Mike, if you might be ready to hand over to talk about Act expo and a quick update on what's happening in medium duty, heavy duty.

Mike Roeth: Yeah. Thanks, Dean. I've got one slide that I'm going to use to do this. Hello, everybody. And I'm excited to share some thoughts here. And it's going to be balanced around the current state of zero emission heavy trucks.

So, first of all, this ZEF of a future has started. There's no doubt about it. We've got electric depots happening. We've got charging hubs, charging as a service beginning. We're at the White House in April with some very clear examples of where corridor charging is getting in place to be able to charge trucks. It's like—I don't know if anybody says this, but it's like the NEVI for trucking has started, say Vegas to LA, LA to El Paso, et cetera, et cetera. So, we're in this.

And from our perspective—and we shared the—we talked about these bullets I'm going to walk through here in our subcommittee. So, these are not just my thoughts. I think it's at least our thoughts—but that regulations for trucks, one, are here, ACT, ACF, MOU states, the EPA greenhouse gas phase three rule, on and on. But as much a motivator to that is sustainability. So, we're starting to really see that really take shape where commitments that were made to such and such by 2030, 2040, 2050 are really requiring actions now and reporting by the folks.

But with those regulations, sustainability also is brought us into this messy middle. So, that's the messy middle of moving from diesel to battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell and zero emission, but also in near zero with things like, the next bullet there, things like renewable diesel, renewable natural gas, compressed natural gas, burning ice in an a—or burning hydrogen in a combustion engine. Hybrid vehicles have been pretty quiet on the commercial vehicle front, but we're starting to hear some of that good, old efficiency. And really, I would say on and on, the pressures and motivations of regulations and sustainability are having the industry act and not wait on battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell to do something. And so that makes trucking really complex.

I've had 40 years in this industry. It's been a complex industry all along. But we always had diesel. And we always had a diesel engine. And so now there's more complexity, which brings me to what Dean was saying. And this is a particularly interesting moment to give a status because, I think, something like 16,000 of us were at ACT Expo in Las Vegas, clearly, the annual audience for what we're talking about here.

And I've been to all 11 ACT Expos for a dozen years now, and I've never seen so many—or a comprehensive group of the stakeholders present. So, utilities were there. Fleets were there in mass, on and on. And it wasn't just the proponents of advanced, clean transportation, but what might be call some of the either opponents or people who are just bringing up a lot of sobering realities, like I call it here.

So, off to the left, that's a few of the main stage speakers. All four of your committee members spoke. I mean, I spoke. I mean, Dean did, Rakesh did, Heinrich did, maybe some more of you did. And so, our perspective on what happened that week is that there were some sobering realities. I would bring up how much of the grid trucks, to Dean's point, are going to require the challenges of getting the power to the depots and to these charging locations, the edge of the grid, so to speak, and on and on.

One thing I would mention is there a fair amount of discussion about the renewableness of the fuels. We hear that a lot on hydrogen, but, of course, it exists on electricity. It exists on natural gas where it could be renewable. Different kinds of renewable natural gas is greener than others. So, dairy, natural gas—if we can burn it in trucks, fantastic.

But RNG was talked about all over the week. Some people make using it in their hydrogen plants to make their hydrogen greener and more renewable using RNG to create electricity at trucking depots. So, recently, Prologis put up a site for performance team in Maersk where they're charging, I think, 90 electric heavy duty Volvo tractors. And most of the electricity is being generated from renewable natural gas. They could not get the utility in southern California to get electricity fast enough, so they went that route.

A couple other quick things, I think one of the things we're seeing is the discussions around passenger cars and the challenge of heavy-duty regional haul and long haul tractors. And you get this class three to six commercial trucks are getting squeezed in the middle. And we see that as a real early adopting fleet, early adopting segment, and one that this committee– the medium duty, heavy duty, we're focused on class six, seven, and eight. These class three to six are in the middle there a little bit.

So, I think with BEVs, we know all of the unknowns, the quote, Rumsfeld. We know the knowns. We know the unknowns. And there aren't very many unknown unknowns on battery electric. But there are on hydrogen fuel cell on some of these other technologies. We just aren't getting into them now and really understanding.

Finally, I would say the two big things that we as a subcommittee and I think the industry ends up hunkering down on is the technology to application fit. So, for instance, if you have team drivers and long haul with disparate routes where that trucks roll in 20 to 22 hours a day with very little time and unexpected routing, electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles are not ready. And it's unlikely that natural gas would have facilities or hydrogen to support it. So, there it's about efficiency. But in other cases, battery electric trucks will do a great job.

And then, finally, something that we're seeing is a lot of the discussions and a lot of the data sometimes confuse what's available now with what's coming soon and what's coming later. And we saw that Dean and Rakesh and I in particular talked about this where you see people talking about something, and they're really talking about data and situation 5 or 10 years down the road and not today versus what the situation is today. And so, I think it's OK to talk about now, soon, and later, but the key is to know what you're talking about so that you can engage parties and make decisions and move on.

So, there's a quick update. I got a link there to one of the discussions. If you want to dive into some of what happened there, go on to actnews.com. You can see it. Thanks a lot, Dean.

Dean Bushey: All right. Thank you, Mike. One of the other things we concentrated on in the medium duty, heavy duty group was what are—we don't like calling them low-hanging fruit, really it's what are the near term goals that this subcommittee and bringing to the larger committee, what could we recommend as things that we could take action on, things that could be actionable?

And I think Rakesh is on the line, too. He's done a fantastic job of looking at what are some of the key initiatives that can help us get the infrastructure out there? How could we work better with the utilities? How could we make total cost of ownership more affordable? So, we have some initial thoughts. And with that, I'll hand it over to Rakesh.

Rakesh Aneja: Yeah. Thanks very much, Dean. And thank you, Mike, for your comments as well. Yeah, good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. It's lovely to see you all again in this forum. And I'll just give maybe a one-minute introduction of the topic before I bring up a document to share with you briefly.

So, as Dean had introduced, we were really thinking of what could be some near to mid-term policy recommendations that we could recommend from the EV working group side. So, we said we'll start as the medium, heavy duty subcommittee, gather our thoughts and see if we can align, and then after we have a proposal, we'd like to share it with the other subcommittees and see if we can gain traction as the EV working group and some of those topics and then share with the Joint Office for the next step. So, that's the overarching background of the topic.

I think it dovetails very nicely with the ACT Expo update and some of the things we've been talking about. Just coming from a medium, heavy duty perspective, we've at a high level stated that we really need three factors or three pillars to be successful in this transformation. We need the vehicles and the products that can do the job for our customers. That's pillar number one. And that is squarely the responsibility of the vehicle OEMs. Not that they don't need any help, but at least we are up to the challenge. Our peers are up to the challenge as well.

The second topic is cost of ownership. And we heard a lot of that during the ACT Expo. These are business tools as you can appreciate. Our customers need to be able to make money with the business tools and be successful in their operations. And just the regulatory push alone may not be adequate. So, that's the second pillar to really have an acceptable cost of ownership.

And then the third is the infrastructure readiness and infrastructure that's reliable and that's ubiquitously available and that ties to the cost of ownership as well so that these assets can be utilized, and they're not waiting to be charged. So, with that background, let me just bring up a document. I want to share the framework of how we are approaching it. I'll share maybe one or two examples. And then as we make this document more mature in the next month or so, I think we'll be ready to distribute something to you for your review and feedback and input as well.

Can you see the screen with the Word document? OK. Excellent. So, the way we are—this is just the table of contents of how we are approaching it and really trying to come up with recommendations, policy recommendation, ideas that could support these two topics that I mentioned. So, total cost of ownership is one that's listed here. And then breaking that down into things that can be done before purchase of these vehicles, for example, utility, make ready incentives at purchase time with vehicle vouchers, rebates on the charging equipment. FEV is an example I'd like to talk about just to explain the thinking behind it and, of course, some after purchase as well with some of the IRA tax credits and things like that.

And then the second pillar as included in this document is that infrastructure piece—so, infrastructure that's reliable and ubiquitously available. And one key element of that is the timeline. Today, at least the vehicles that are in production can be made available in a few months. Infrastructure timelines are easily measured in years. So, what can be done from a supply chain equipment perspective as well as maybe some of the investor-owned utilities? What are some of the things they can do to get ahead of this anticipated demand and get some of those activities started? So, those are the two broad categories in terms of how this document is organized, again, cost of ownership and the infrastructure side.

And I'll just scroll down to give you an example of one of those topics, or maybe we can look at a couple of those topics. And as I introduced earlier, it's really built around these three pillars. So, vehicles that are available to do the job, cost of ownership that's acceptable, and infrastructure that's dependable. The high level themes that we are trying to address is cost competitiveness of zero emission solutions tied to the cost of ownership piece, infrastructure leading the vehicle deployments—as I mentioned a couple of minutes back—and policies that target the entire ecosystem—not only regulatory landscape dependent, but something that can generate a higher and a stronger pull from the market and from the customers by addressing the entire ecosystem.

And last but not the least is technology neutrality wherever possible. So, certainly battery electric has some of the initial momentum. Mike talked about some of the unknown unknowns with hydrogen, but certainly that deserves a place at the table with fuel cell and H2 technologies as well as we feel they'll have a complementary role to play in decarbonization. So, with that, I'm going to scroll down and just come up maybe with one example, or if we have time, we can look at a second one. I think the FEV may be a good one to talk about this one.

So, today, as an example, there is a 12%, 12.5% federal excise tax that's applied to the sale of heavy-duty vehicles. And today, the zero emission vehicles, the battery electric vehicles, are two to three times more expensive than their comparable diesel counterparts. So, again, from a percentage basis, if we take that 12% and you apply it to something that's three times more expensive, that's a substantially significant dollar figure, and it's easily offsetting the $40,000 IRA tax credit incentives that is available for some of these zero emission vehicles, battery electric vehicles.

So, as a recommendation, we want us to consider that can we think about FET relief for vehicles that are recognized as zero carbon till a defined time period? So, under the EPA greenhouse gas phase three rule, let's say till 2032, can we get some relief or exemption on that FET completely? And after that, maybe it's capped to a dollar amount rather than a percentage amount, which could be equivalent to the comparable diesel counterparts.

And wherever possible, we try to come up with and think about what is a comparable model policy. And here's one example with the CARES Act, which granted some exemption to the aviation industry to provide relief from reductions in air travel during the pandemic. And also, at a high level at least, what could a program cost impact would be? So, certainly, there'll be some phased in impact till 2032, but after that, capping it to a dollar amount, at least from an overall dollar perspective, it should have no impact to the highway trust fund.

So, here is just one example. And I know that we're just scratching the surface. We really need the entire expertise and the horsepower to weigh in whether this recommendation makes sense. The way it's structured, does it make sense? Or how can we refine it to make it even better? But I just wanted to give you one example of the type of recommendations that we are thinking about. And there are, I would say, about 15 to 20 of these categorized in those various areas that I talked about earlier. And maybe I'll pick one more example and then we can have a discussion or Q&A at the end. And a good one would be maybe on the infrastructure side now.

So, bear with me as I scroll down. Here is another one. It's also cost-related, but very quickly, so electric rates that are favorable for transportation, electrification. And this comes to the operating cost side of things. So, what is the energy cost, which is a big part of the overall cost of ownership, total cost of ownership today for our commercial vehicles? So, that's why the dealer—diesel costs—excuse me, the dollar per gallon is extremely important. And as we move to a battery electric vehicle, the dollar per kilowatt hour is extremely important.

So, here is one example where the barrier is that as these vehicles will require significant amounts of power, that requires distribution system upgrades. And the investor-owned utilities are looking to fund these upgrades via rate increases. So, as that rate increase is applied to the fleets that are looking for these type of upgrades, that, again, puts a pretty big damper on the cost of ownership and the TCO equation overall. So, can there be some federally backed no or low interest type of programs for these utilities to help build out the required capacity in anticipation of the regulatory landscape and the electrification demand that's coming at US over the next eight to ten years if we look at just the EPA greenhouse gas phase three rule without putting an additional pressure on the ratepayers from an overall cost of ownership perspective? So, let me pause here.

As I mentioned earlier, just a couple of examples to give flavor of how we are approaching this topic—not quite ready for prime time—still a draft document that even the medium, heavy duty working group is still noodling on. So, we'll need some more time, a few weeks, before we can really align on this topic. But after that, I'd love to share the document to the other subcommittees for your feedback and, of course, additional topics to come in so that we really have something that we can present to the Joint Office. And one of our upcoming meetings is some low-hanging fruit or near to midterm recommendations on the policy side.

Dean Bushey: Rakesh, fantastic. So, I think you'll see in the document, as we put together, and you've already heard it, these are cross-cutting issues. It's not just medium duty, heavy duty. These are issues that impact grid integration, grid readiness, light duty vehicles. So, it's a fantastic work so far. But as you said, we're going to put together more work and bring it forward. Cognizant of time, I'm going to hit Rachel. Do I have five minutes?

Rachael Sack: Yes, you do.

Dean Bushey: OK, great. I'm going to hit the KPI framework and a template and explain what we mean by that. This KPI framework really is designed not to say how are we doing as a subcommittee, how are we doing as a working group, it's really designed to look at how is the industry doing. Are we moving forward? Are we moving forward with technology? Are we moving forward with regulations? Are we moving forward with innovations? Are we moving forward with research and development? And I will share this with Rachel. We'll hand it out. And I have to—Heinrich did this work. So, I really, really appreciate this.

The framework that we propose—and this has to be going—we'll send these to the subcommittee leads. The subcommittee leads can send it to the subcommittees. What are the KPIs that we want to measure? When we get done with this next year and the year after and the year after that, where can we look to say, are we moving forward and where do we need to concentrate? For example, the EV market share might be a KPI that we would like to measure. What is the baseline value and what are the target dates?

Some of the KPIs that we're looking at just to how we thought about this research and development innovations, product performance, such as battery life, battery capacity, battery range. What is market adoption for EVs, both in medium duty, heavy duty, and for light duty? What about fleet composition? How are the fleets transitioning? What are they actually buying? And what orders are out there?

How is the infrastructure? Is it ready? Is the grid ready? Is the integration ready? Are the energy supplied? Is the energy supply there. And what about the environmental impacts? And I'm going to stop there because these are really just notional or draft KPIs that we've been discussing that again, will be cross-cutting. So, with that, I will stop sharing. And open it up and hand it back to Rachel for questions.

Rachael Sack: Great. Thank you very much. This is all great information. Nadia, you've got the first hand.

Nadia El Mallakh: Best on the hand draw. First of all, really love the policy template. I think maybe I don't– when you share it, I think the other groups may utilize the same template too because I think we're all thinking about those things. But we really love the organization that some folks on my subcommittee were liking that organization. So, looking forward to seeing that whenever you can, even though it's still in draft format.

Question on—or just a comment on the KPIs, I agree, tracking to the macro level targets. I think also though, having a way to orient that and ladder to that for the working group itself and then even the subcommittees using that version of that same format, very simplified. So, that would be the one. And I know we had talked a little bit about that in our group meeting, but just sharing for the full committee working group that we think having some standardization, even for own subcommittees, will be very helpful for tracking.

Rakesh Aneja: And Nadia, to your comment on the policy document, my original thought was just gain alignment and traction within the medium, heavy duty subcommittee before I shared it. In the spirit of efficiency and timeliness, I have no issue sharing it right away. Please recognize this is a draft status. Not everyone's had a chance to review and weigh in. But with that disclaimer, I think to this member group for feedback, I would love to share the document and get your perspective so that we can include it as well.

Nadia El Mallakh: Awesome. Thank you.

Rachael Sack: Hey, Crystal.

Crystal Philcox: Thanks. First of all, I love the KPI template. I think that's so critical and would love to see us all use something similar. Fantastic. I just had one question about whether you had any discussion about fuel excise tax that is in existence today. I think it funds actually the highway transportation fund and whether or not you had any recommendations about how to treat that as this rolls out.

Dean Bushey: We as a subcommittee have not discussed that. Obviously, a lot of us have discussed whether it's a vehicle miles traveled, how do you integrate electric vehicles into that gallon subsidy so it supports the highway transportation fund? But as a subcommittee, we did not discuss that yet.

Rachael Sack: Right. Lara.

Lara Chaco: Hi. Yeah. So, my question tags on to that, which is more of one for maybe, Michael, Rachael, Rachael, et cetera, which is as we start to look at—we've talked a lot about how do we accelerate EV adoption. But I think we're missing a large part of the puzzle here as an EV working group, which is what are the perhaps unintended policy consequences or ramifications that happen, and how do we address those?

And one—so, one, for example, is Highway Trust Fund. So, one is how do we address really critical issues, like the Highway Trust Fund, which are not receiving any kind of funding from electric vehicles and yet that is the way and the mechanism in which we keep our roadways and infrastructure up to date? So, to me, from my perspective, again, representing both private sector companies but infrastructure owner operators, is our transportation system in this transition to electrification is much more than just the charging stations.

There's a lot more that's incorporated into this. It's the state of our infrastructure. It's how we're funding our infrastructure. It's recognizing the increased weight and wear from heavier vehicles. And so how are we offsetting for that? And so, I just wonder how is an EV working group—are we thinking about—or maybe are we thinking about addressing those issues? And where does that fit within our charge? Because quite frankly, it does span, I'd say, multiple issues and subgroups.

Rachael Sack: Does anyone want to respond?

Rachael Nealer: Yeah. I think, Lara, it's a really good point. Maybe it's something that we can have a discussion about either later if we have some more time. But what are some of the issues that as we dive into the subcommittee framework that we might be missing as a broader framework and things that we need to address?

I will say that we probably have to balance both where we are looking at the overall, but we also are working on specific recommendations. Actually, that's exactly the framing that I was thinking for the KPIs. So, I really appreciate the initial cut at what the KPIs are. And I think that we probably need at least four sets of KPIs. One is the overall EV working group set of KPIs and the issues that support those, so like EV sales, EV charging infrastructure, maybe it's the highway tax fund, maybe there's a couple really high level ones that we want to track closely. And then I think each subcommittee should also have its own KPIs that are a little bit more specific to each one of their topical areas.

Also, the crosscuts, equity, workforce, and supply chain—how are those getting rolled up in maybe the overall one? And then subcommittees have more detailed frameworks for KPIs. At least that's how I was thinking about it. So, maybe it's a question to ask during the discussion, Lara, is as we develop out these metrics or these recommendations, are there any higher level ones that we are missing because we've organized ourselves in subcommittees?

Michael Berube: I was going to co—yeah, I just uh—We should all be making our list of these key recommendation areas that maybe we're not covering or missing, and then we can—and we put them together. I love how specific the medium duty group was.

And so, I was going to comment just in the one thing about the low standard that comes up a lot—I couldn't quite put my finger right in the data—but the vast, vast majority of EVs studies have shown like just don't have any impact as the weight of them is just so under the weight designed for the roads. Now, you get to heavy duty trucks. That can be a different story. But so. understanding—some of these might be like we need to understand or do a definitive study that measures something or dah, dah, dah, and comes up with information like that then recommendations of how to deal with it, something to that effect.

Rachael Sack: John.

John Bozzella: Yeah. I think just to build on what both Lara and Michael mentioned, I do think this is an important question, so the overall burden because it isn't just taxes to the Highway Trust Fund. The fact of the matter is there are states around the country that impose obviously fuel taxes, but also taxes on EVs, some of which are punitive in nature. So, I think we have to have an overall perspective on—maybe that's the KPI, some sort of overall sense of burden. Like, how do we think about fair share across the sectors? And what should the EV be paying to support the infrastructure? So, generally, support Lara's point very much so, but it is a KPI challenge for us. And I do think it's something that the working group needs to at least look at.

Rachael Sack: Any other comments on the subject and for the medium, heavy duty group, generally? Mayor.

John Giles: Thanks. I just want to chime in and say I agree with that we ought to address the highway user gas tax fund. I mean, I think just overall, our charge is to look for opportunities and challenges related to adoption of EVs. And that means debunking criticisms that the industry is going to receive. And this is one of those things that's out there is that EVs are not paying their fair share.

And so, I think—I mean, this certainly is something. I think we ought to lead with this and where appropriate, find productive solutions to attack some of these punitive measures that are being addressed by folks who want to discourage the adoption of EVs and be proactive on it and find a more equitable way for ultimately how are EVs going to contribute to the infrastructure use of the roads, so commensurate with ice vehicles. So, yeah, I think if we don't take this issue up, it will continue to be one of those things that people use to criticize the adoption of EV use.

Rachael Sack: Sharky.

Sharky Laguana: I was struck by what Michael just said about the weight of EVs being well under the rated capacity of the roads. I don't know that that's a talking point that I've ever heard before. And so, I think, I guess, in terms of developing and forming public consensus around how to distribute the burdens, stuff like that seems like a really important data point to me. And part of the EV working group's thought process perhaps should be like not just how do we socialize those concepts that, for instance, the weight of the vehicles is under the weighted capacity, but how do we get buy-in across multiple different political constituencies?

How do we make this winner, winner chicken dinner? Because it seems like that is where we struggle a little bit around EV policy is getting the other side to participate in a constructive dialogue. And we may want to think about how—from the ground up, how do we start from a place of consensus or approach consensus building.

Rachael Sack: Joung.

Joung Lee: A lot of great points being made. I'll just add that, look, I think the federal policy on highway infrastructure makes a lot of impact and difference in this country because of the funding behind it, thanks to the highway trust fund. So, to the extent that we want to have the stable platform to encourage EV adoption in the long run, we got to look at how we figure out this trust fund solvency as well.

Rachael Sack: Well, the medium and heavy duty group sparked a lot of conversation. So, great, great presentations, great questions to follow. Any other final questions or comments for this group?

OK. And just a reminder for our attendees, you'll be able to participate during our public comment period. So, this is for our working group discussion at this time. So, seeing no other questions or comments, we're going to allow everyone some time to digest these thoughts and next steps. We're a little ahead of schedule, so we're going to take a break and reconvene at our planned time of 2:55 where we'll hear from the charging network subcommittee.

And then following that, we have time for a discussion to talk about some of those interim recommendations and next steps, generally. We talked a lot about where the KPIs could go, for example. So, Rachael will lead us through that discussion, and then we'll conclude with the public comment session. So, again, we're going to break now, and will we reconvene at 2:55. Thank you.

And we'll get started in one minute. OK, as people are coming back, let's just recap the first half of our meeting. So, thank you to the grid integration and medium and heavy duty subcommittees for your updates and discussion. Now we're going to hear from the charging network subcommittee and then use all of the information and hopefully some epiphanies that you had during our break today to lead into our discussion conversation tied to future recommendations. So, I will turn it over to John, and we can hear from the charging network group along with some Q&A.

John Bozzella: OK, great. Thank you very much, everybody. I'm going to do a quick setup and then take you through a couple of slides, maybe more than a couple of slides, sorry. But it'll be informative and quick, I promise you that. But before I get into that, let me thank the members of the subcommittee who really have been very active and thoughtful and passionate about the set of issues that we're trying to explore to accelerate the development of EV charging infrastructure, which is our charge and then, of course, how that all fits into EV adoption, whether it's light, medium, or heavy duty. So great discussions, really appreciate it. So, I'll do a quick pitch, and then I'll ask my subcommittee colleagues to jump in to support or maybe even challenge some of the points I make.

So, there are going to be two categories of ideas you're going to see in addition to some informational updates. One is a series of big questions we're still grappling with and that we want to get a reality check from the committee on. And then the second are two specific, actionable, near-term ideas that we think we can move forward with in the near term that address some of the challenges that we're seeing in the data. And so, with that, I'm going to share my screen, if this works. Do you see something that says charging network subcommittee?

Speaker: Yes.

John Bozzella: OK, good. First, an apology. This ended up on Alliance for Automotive Innovation visibility. I'm not sure why that is, but this is not work of Alliance for Automotive Innovation, where I live and work. It is a summary of the subcommittee discussion. So, we will—when we post this slide deck to huddle, we'll make sure that it is in a more generic appropriate version.

So, first, I want to pick up where Dean left off with what Nadia referred to with regard to metrics. Great, great discussion. And we do believe that this is a really important discussion, both at the macro level as well as metrics and KPIs specific to our subcommittee work. So, quick, quick review, big picture. Some of this data was mentioned, but it's worth looking at it quantitatively as well as qualitatively. This is a federal advisory committee, so it is helpful to understand what it is that the government is scoring toward. These are light duty EV adoption goals out toward 2030 and beyond in three areas.

One, the US National blueprint. Secondly, recently finalized light duty, greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions regulations. And then thirdly, under the Clean Air Act, federal Clean Air Act ACC2 or the State of California and its fellow travelers requirements of 100% EVs as a percentage of new car sales by 2025. You heard our colleagues, Dean and Mike, mentioned the medium and heavy duty phase three. I think Rakesh mentioned it as well as CAP has its own—California has its own version of this as well. That is what our metrics have to account for, how we are doing against these broader goals.

So, to give a little bit of color to how we in this particular subcommittee have been thinking about these macro metrics, here are a couple of topics or measures of success that came up in our various conversations so far, a measure with regard to interest, adoption rate, availability across makes and models and segments, affordability, availability of public charging, both the number, the distribution, meaning how equitable is this availability of charging, building codes, supply chain, and the ability to develop advanced battery technologies and advanced technology in the space broadly in the United States.

So, as we work with Dean and Heinrich and Nadia, we will adopt that framework that Dean presented and use the—what do we call it? The spreadsheet that was developed by Heinrich, too, to build these KPIs into that process. And we will use the subcommittee, touch base or base touch that Dean referred to make sure that between Nadia, Dean, and this subcommittee that we stay aligned and have one overall level or one overall perspective on KPIs at the macro level.

A little bit of—as Mike did with heavy duty and light and medium duty, a little bit of perspective on the current EV market and the current charger market because it's incredibly dynamic, I guess I'll use the term. So, this is what the current market looks like through the end of Q1, 2024. The next several slides are information from a report that we do called, Get Connected. If you're interested in this data, you can get it at autosinnovate.org and click on the button that says sign up for insights. And you can sign up for Get Connected. And you can see on a quarterly basis a review of the market. And so, what you see is continued growth, but a slowing of that growth.

What you can see here is year over year change in powertrain market share. And the takeaway here is gas, diesel. In other words, ice, powertrain market share is in fact going down, but it's being taken up 100% by hybrid growth, mild hybrids, as well as plug-in hybrids. And so, the battery electric vehicle growth is slowing and the plug-in hybrid and hybrid electrified vehicle portion of the market is growing fairly dramatically.

This is a look at charging infrastructure. And what you can see right now is a total of 62,760 locations and 167,000 ports or things you can plug into a car. And so, we do need to keep track with regard to ports at a level 2 level—as Nadia and Michael mentioned, that is primarily home and work charging and as well as DC fast charging the level—the so-called level 3 or DC fast charging is a public, high-speed charging that people expect to work really quickly as they're moving quickly from point A to point B.

If you look at these data points together—and I'm not going to take you through a lot more—what you'll see is even at today's rate of growth, the EV market, the vehicle market is growing more quickly than the charging market. This is, of course, from our friends at NREL, their view of what is required with regard to charging ports to meet a 50% EV sales goal by 2030, which is what was in the blueprint. And so it's an awful lot of charging required. And so, if you take the end of Q1 2024, and you take that out, what you see—I'm sorry, what you see is that we need to install three chargers every 10 minutes between now and the end of the decade. So, it's an enormous pace that is required. That's all chargers, not just level 3 chargers. But we need a lot of DC fast-charging to move forward.

A note on DC fast-charging and a comment about the NREL data, one of the things that we've been trying to—sorry about—that we've been trying to work through as a subcommittee is whether that framework is right. And what we're seeing is data, for example, recently released by McKinsey that suggests that while today's EV buyer is a largely charge at home buyer, future EV buyers are not going to be charge at home buyers. And so it could be that the assumptions that we're making with regard to the amount of charging done at home may not be right for the future market. And so, this is something probably NREL is already looking at. And so, we probably should, as a subcommittee and maybe a full committee, understand the extent to which NREL is looking at that question.

Lastly, I want to raise capital. And kudos to my friend and colleague, Sharky, who has mentioned over and over again that at the end of the day, really this is about the availability of capital to invest in charging. Our conversations with EVSCs and some of the conversations I've had with investors supports this. And so again, using the NREL data, we need a ton of money to really get where we need to go just in terms of publicly accessible fast-charging ports between $27 and $44 billion to build out the infrastructure.

So, from an overall subcommittee perspective, the big questions we're still working through—how do we bring more private capital into the EV charging space? Secondly, as I mentioned, assessing the need for even more fast, publicly available fast charging. And then, third, to the crosscutting objectives of all of the subcommittees, how do we make sure that we have the workforce necessary to build out an acceptable—excuse me, an accessible and equitable charging network? So, those are big picture questions that we're still moving through.

I want to shift now to KPIs at a more macro level. We had a briefing from ChargeX. I think Michael or Gabe referenced the work of ChargeX. And so, we've spent some time understanding what they are working on with regard to KPIs. We think they're on the right track in terms of looking at these categories, KPIs with regard to finding a charger, accessing a charger, starting a charge, and completing a charge. And so you can see in our discussion with—you can see these notes below in our discussion with ChargeX some of the things we talked about. What is appropriate uptime? How do we think about reliability and redundancy as well as other customer-facing KPIs?

Which brings us to the minimum standards in NEVI. So, bear with me for a second. But we had a discussion within our subcommittee about what our customer expectations with regard to charging because what we see in the data—and I do commend the recent McKinsey report that just out on this. What you'll see in the data is that there is significant concern with regard to the availability of charging, the cost of charging, but just as importantly, the characteristics of charging, whether it's in a safe place, whether there's signage, whether there are multiple payments accepted and the like.

And so, what we see in the NEVI minimum standards is voice given in the form of requirements for public funding for NEVI on many of these metrics or elements. We think this is really good. And this has led to the first of our two actionable short-term ideas. And so, here's one.

We think we should apply the NEVI minimum standards or something very like them to all charging ports, not just those funded through the NEVI program. So, what you see on the left is data that I pulled out of the McKinsey report. And what you can see is customers very focused on charging speed and cost, but also safety of the location, the reliability, the availability of free spots, payment options, Wi-Fi, proximity to their destination, et cetera.

And so, what this tells us is that when you look at this data, EV buyers expect a convenient, safe charging experience. And so, we think that the NEVI standards apply to all charging ports is a way for us to get there and then to hopefully accelerate adoption as a result of it. I think it's worth looking just at a little bit of this data for a second. 70% of current EV owners say they're dissatisfied with the current infrastructure, and only 10% think there are enough charging points available.

Now, Gabe is on the case, as you heard, and we really appreciate the work that the Joint Program Office is doing. So, this isn't a criticism. It's just a sense of where the customer is today. More importantly, in my view, 42% of hesitant EV buyers, in other words people who aren't ready to buy one yet, state they won't purchase an EV until battery capacity and driving range improve. So, what does that mean? That means both technology improvement and availability, public availability of charging, are going to have to come together to encourage the pace of light duty EV adoption.

I want to make an important point here before I move on to the next idea. And that is that we don't know quite yet as a subcommittee how this gets applied. So, in other words, it certainly—it could be a stick. In other words, states or localities could adopt minimum standards just as they do codes and standards in other aspects of the EV space. Or it could be some form of carrot, or incentive, or encouragement that might be built into either private capital or some sort of subsidy. So, we haven't—I want to be very clear, and it was a passionate debate. We haven't concluded yet how to do this, but we think it's really important. And we think the data supports increasing standards, customer facing standards as well as technology standards associated with charging.

So, let me go on to the second idea, the second near term actionable idea. And that is that we ought to consider a public education and awareness campaign. Gabe touched on this in his opening comments. We have seen this work in other areas. And I've been a part of this on the private sector side where government agencies and the private sector come together to develop public awareness around technology developments and safety campaigns.

For example, think Click It or Ticket, a combination of advertising and awareness to improve seatbelt usage as well as policy to enforce seatbelt usage. So, we think that there is an opportunity to develop an awareness campaign starting around the ease and awareness of charging. Some of this is myth busting. I think others think the mayor mentioned myth busting and others mentioned myth busting.

So, if you'll bear with me for a second, after talking to the subcommittee, we did at the alliance, ask one of our agencies to just come up with what a nominal version, just a general version of a campaign, an education and awareness campaign, around the ease and awareness of charging would look like. So, I'll just take you through, quickly, what a couple of storyboards might look at.

So, this is the easiest part of driving. EVs are easy. So that's the idea. I'm not going to read all of this. But what you can see here is the idea of this is easy. This is anybody can do this. What could be easier? And so, the idea is we compare this to other driving tasks. It's easier than changing lanes. And then some true and false, can I do this in the winter? Can I do this when it's raining? How do I do this? It takes forever. Does it really? That kind of thing. And you go through a series of myth-busting or true and false, and then you get to this very simple idea.

Step one, find a charging station on your app. Step two, pull in and plug-in. Step three, pay with your card or app. And then the idea is hard versus easy. EVs is easy. So just to give you an example, this is not by any means work that we as a subcommittee agree or a concept we agree to implement. It is meant only to be illustrative of where we could start as we are building broader awareness of EVs and the usefulness and the benefits of EVs, starting with charging, which is where the action is. So, let me stop there and first ask my fellow subcommittee members whether they have anything they want to add. And then I'll turn it back to Rachel to lead the conversation.

Andrew Koblenz: So, this is Andy. I'll jump in. And I just want to first commend John for a phenomenal presentation there. He summarized what a lot of what we talked about. And I think his message is in part, and I'll be a little more direct. We need to be a little bit more steely-eyed about what's going on in the marketplace, and we need to read that data that's coming because the public, and they're the most important people that we can talk about today because they are the ones who have to buy, lease, or rent the EVs for us to achieve the objectives of the EV working group.

The public is sending us a little bit of a message in that data there. The fact that PEVs and hybrids are growing rapidly and EVs are actually declining in the last couple of months as a percentage of the market tells us something about what their hesitance is. And John has put his finger on it. It is this charging infrastructure challenge.

And I'll add one other point, the leveled—and Sharky was also in our conversations, one of who brought this to our attention. Level 2 chargers may not be the greatest thing out there because they charge too slowly to meet the needs of the driving public. And we got 126,000 of them right now versus only 41,000 of the fast chargers. So, we may be a little bit more behind the eight ball than we think. So, we need to be responsive. We need to drive our KPIs, need to look at what the public wants, and we need to start with what the barriers that the public is saying and then we need to address them. I think the two ideas go to that exactly. And I think the McKinsey study shows that.

And the first idea of adopting the NEVI however we enforce it, whether it's voluntary peer pressure or however it's enforced, it goes to some of the very concerns that we're hearing from the public. And secondly, the education campaign. And the only thing that maybe John and I have a little distance, I don't want to start educating until we can—it is true what those statements are, that it is easier. And I don't want to run into the people going out and getting a level 2 charger and finding out that it takes too long for them. But absolutely busting the myths and elevating the awareness when the solutions are there is exactly the right way. So, I commend John. I think he summarized it great. And those would be my additional thoughts. Thanks.

John Bozzella: I think Crystal wants to jump in. I think the whole subcommittee is going to make a comment. So Crystal, then Sharky, then Ruth.

Crystal Philocx: Yeah. John, thank you. That was really—that was fantastic. Really great summary of our discussion and all the things we talked about. But just speaking to the truth that Andrew brought up, one of the things that I thought was super informative was the data work that the ChargeX is doing because they are really starting to dig into the details of what the data can tell you, so making sure that when you show up and it says it's a fast charger, it's actually a fast charger, and it's not a level 2 or that when you get there, that it's accurate and whether that charging station is operational or not.

So, those kinds of—and they're finding a lot of disparate data across the industry and trying to sync that up and come up with more of a standardized data set so that you can have apps that can guide you directly to the place that you want to be that is actually working and operational. So, really good work going on there.

John Bozzella: Sharky, did you want to jump in or Ruth?

Sharky Laguana: Ruth, go ahead.

Ruth Gratzke: Yeah. So, just two additional aspects. First of all, John, thank you for putting all this together because I think it gives a great insight into the complexity of what we're faced with. And to add this to the complexity a bit more, yes, we have consumer sentiment that says, hey, why don't we just all go to DC fast charging? But you can't forget that a DC fast charger requires a whole lot more power. So, deploying them, getting them in the ground is a lot more complex, requires really closer collaboration with utilities. And that is part of the reason why the deployment speed is where we are.

I think our perspective is speaking for my company. My home charging is the more cost-effective way. Yes, it takes time, but to discredit this right now and just say we all moved to DC fast charging, that can't be the path either. I think it's a smart and elegant balance between both that needs to happen.

And to the point of really finding some form of common ground and so to say preconditions for charger deployment, I mean, whether it's NEVI, I think it's the best we have at this point of time. But this requirement—communication requirement—feeding information about the charger health into some form of common platform and looking for at least public chargers that might get the user experience here, I think that will be one key piece. And keep in mind that, Mike, right now we're seeing a whole lot of ChargePoint operators and charger manufacturers going belly up. And we got to figure out what to do with the stranded equipment. There's a lot of realities, I think, that just in the last three months are really starting to bite.

John Bozzella: Yeah, no question. Just before we go to Sharky, just so we're clear, the comments on level 2, at least the ones that I made, were not in reference to where we are today. It's a question of as we go into a broader segment of the market where home charging is not as available, what the data is saying is we're going to need more public charging. But I totally agree with you. Right now, the vast majority of BEV charging in the light duty sector is at home, 80% or more. So, we are 100% are aligned there.

I think the comment I was making is I want to make sure we're future-proofed in terms of the work that we're doing and how it relates to grid resiliency, for example, and how it relates to capital formation. So, really appreciate your experience, your personal experience, in that space. So, thank you.

Andrew Koblenz: And if I could jump in, Shark, just one comment to Ruth's. I just want to clarify what and expanded what John just said, which I agree with. I was talking about public charging and the expectations that the public may have about how quickly they could charge at a public site when they're traveling [INAUDIBLE]. And that was the point, that we need to be reflective of what the public's demand is. So, my comments about level 2 and level 3 were absolutely about public charging, not about home charging.

Rachael Sack: Sharky.

Sharky Laguana: So, John, first of all, incredible synthesis of the work of our subcommittee. So, thank you for putting all that together. That was a lot of work. And I think it reflected the subcommittees input very well. Also agree with what Andy said that we should be careful about how we present to the public how easy something is. And until it is actually true, I think it is incumbent upon us to make sure it is true when we start making those promises.

And finally, Ruth, just how critical your input is here, an important reminder that wherever we head with on street charging strategy, it has to not only be meet consumer expectations, but it has to be sustainable from an operator standpoint. It's one thing to get it up off the ground vis-a-vis subsidy and using either a carrot or a stick approach to get people to invest in DC fast technology. But another question is, will they have a sustainable business once they do?

And I think that that's something when we think about our KPIs, we should be thinking about the sustainable health of these operational chargers from the operator level. It's not just purely a capital contribution problem, but it's also an ecosystem health problem from an economic standpoint.

And the last thing I'd want to say, I mean, John, you alluded to this with future proofing. But I think one thing that the EV working group could potentially do—and I've had a couple conversations with folks about this—is there a—thinking about leveraging the universe of small entrepreneurs out there who are probably going to make up the meat and bulk of the contributions to charger capacity, you look at the amount of information that's out there for them to absorb, is there something that we can do to concisely give them a sense of what metrics do they need to focus on, both in terms of amount of capital needed and also what are the metrics you need to focus on in order to have a sustainable operation, whatever your location is? Maybe it is number of EVs in your geographic region, some sense of being able to predict demand.

And then the second part of this is—and this goes to the future proofing part—what is our expectations around technology and where it's going to be? Are we skating to where the puck is going to be? And are we encouraging our investors to skate to where our charging investors– are we encouraging them to skate to where the puck is going to be? Are there potential advancements in battery technology that are going to change usage patterns? Are there changes in charging technology that are going to change how that looks from a cost standpoint? Is waiting six months going to make a material difference in the amount of capital required?

So, these are all things. This is such a fluid environment from an entrepreneurial standpoint, from somebody looking at this from the perspective of making these capital decisions, the more amount of succinct visibility that they can have into what are the things they actually need to be thinking about, this is one way that we can leverage a larger number of people making investments and not just making investments from a volume standpoint, but from a quality standpoint, a sustainable investment that delivers good returns to the investors, which is I think is the best, fastest way to achieve the EV working group's goals. Great yield back.

RACHAEL SACK: All right. Anyone else have any additional comments or questions for this group? Anyone who has not yet spoken that would like to chime in on anything you've heard so far? OK, well, this gives us more time to lead into—

John Bozzella: There's two. Cassie and Michael have their hands up, by the way, Rachel.

Rachael Sack: Oh, that's interesting. I'm sorry.

John Bozzella: [INAUDIBLE] do on my screen.

Rachael Sack: OK. Well, it's not on my screen, so thank you for flagging that.

John Bozzella: You're welcome.

Rachael Sack: Great. Cassie and Michael.

Michael Berube: Cassie, you go first.

Cassie Powers: Thanks. And thanks, John, for the information. Very interesting. And this is likely something we'll cover during the discussion. But the idea of applying the NEVI standards to all charging stations, I think, is a great one. It would help to ensure experience across chargers and would just love to hear a little bit more, almost a temperature check, from the private sector folks about the feasibility of the private sector adopting the NEVI standards for non-NEVI funded stations. I know you had mentioned carrots versus sticks. And sticks is certainly one way to go, seems potentially necessary, but love thoughts on that.

John Bozzella: Yeah. So that's the next step. We wanted a reality check from the full committee. That would be clearly one of the next steps. I've done a few soundings. And I don't want to mention the companies because they're publicly-traded. But I think the bigger companies that are in the space are ready to do this or are doing it. And so to me—and that's why we're trying to figure out the carrot and the stick thing because there could be an opportunity where the capital conversation and the race becomes—helps a race to the top conversation. And then you put Sharky's idea together. Here's where you go to understand how potential investors think about this.

But at least the two conversations I've had with companies in this space, they're like, yeah, yeah, for level 3, we have to do it this way. We can't have a bad experience. So, that tells me that it's going to be—it's probably—I don't think it's a non-starter. I guess I would go that far.

Michael Berube: I can actually add on that, too. Ionia, the network being supported by six, seven auto OEMs and said publicly that they intend to have all their chargers meet the NEVI standards.

John Bozzella: Yep. They're one of them.

Michael Berube: Yep. Yep.

John Bozzella: You can probably now guess the other.

[LAUGHTER]

Michael Berube: So, I was wondering the—you had mentioned some McKinsey data on—I think a number of you raised a question we ask ourselves regularly, which is, is the future of how people charge home charging versus non-home level 2, which is again, almost all home versus DC fast-charging, like, how confident are we that will it change or not? I'd be curious in the McKinsey study suggesting that.

I can say we did just recently look at updated data, and it didn't give us any reason to change what we've had in that study, which is tracks very well with a lot of other people. Now, that could just be that we're all in group think. No one has an answer. So, 10 separate analysts are coming up with the same thing because there isn't a better answer. That is absolutely a possibility.

But the fundamentals of technology changing, things like that, would actually lead us to believe that home charging will continue to remain the most preferred way, and if anything might go up because over time, if anything we see the cost diverging or home charging stays low and maybe public charging gets more expensive as you get lower utilization rates at some because you're expanding to lower utilized places, higher costs for power, and then as range goes up, some vehicles, your need for charging away from home goes down other than longer trips, which are already completely slated to be DC fast charging. But we'd love to see other data because I do think it's something that we have to continually ask ourselves to make sure we're not missing something.

John Bozzella: Yeah. No, I agree 100%. The thing that struck me in the McKinsey data is among current EV owners, 48% report that they have their own parking spot and a suitable power outlet among non-EV owners, 21% report the same thing.

So, in other words, what's happening is we've sold every vehicle we can to all the early adopters and to almost all the easy adopters. And so, this next segment is the hard—is now we're starting to get into the place where trade-offs are apparent. And so that's really what's driving this question.

Michael Berube: Yeah. Yeah.

John Bozzella: I'm not saying—look, NREL, it's the model right now. So, I'm not trying to question the model right now. What I'm saying is, is there—how are we looking at these developments over time? And what is the process by which NREL is refreshing this point of view?

Michael Berube: Yeah. Yeah.

John Bozzella: Because the light duty sector is not the same. It just—it is not the same. I'm a super easy EV. I got charging all over the place. I have it at home, I have it at work, and I got it in between because I live in a city. It's different as we get out beyond people like us.

Michael Berube: Yep. I'll forward along a study that looks out to 2050 exactly those questions. How many have home? How many have—and it tries to forecast over time between now and 2050 as you get potentially all vehicles are closed, all vehicles to be electrified, what that ratio looks like of people that have home charging capability versus not—

John Bozzella: Can I just—perfect. And I just want to mention one more point here. The good news or bad news, depending on how you absorb what I'm about to say, is these people that are rejecting BEVs are not buying internal combustion engine vehicles. They're buying hybrids or plug-in hybrids. So, they are replacing petroleum miles with electric miles. So, it's just maybe not as much electric miles as you might want. But what the data is also showing is these people who can't plug-in at home, they're buying hybrids.

Rachael Sack: Before I turn it over to Andrew and Sharky, I just wanted to remind our public, who's listening in, that we will have a public comment period at the end of today's meeting starting around 4:30. So, if you have your hand raised now, we will ask at 4:30 when the public comment session begins to raise your hand then. So, for now, we'll continue our working group discussion. Andrew and Sharky.

Andrew Kooblenz: Great. Thanks, Rachael. Yeah. And, Mike, John made one of the points I wanted to make, which is that it is that we read the lesson. That's what I was when I was referring read the lesson that the market is sending us from those upticks and plug-in hybrids and conventional hybrids. The dealers will tell you that even in very affluent, progressive areas of the country, they're still buying the plug-in hybrids because of the concerns that I was articulating.

And the other point, Michael, is—and you said that you saw a study that had you out to 2050. I was going to say, yeah, the answer to your question about what it's going to look like, I think, depends on what your time horizon is. The further we get out, I think the more it's going to look like what you say. We're going to have this dip where we're going to have to have more external public reliance, and then we'll return to where we build out. Even in multi-unit dwellings, we'll build out charging opportunities for people living there. So, it depends on how long the time horizon is versus to answer the questions you're asking. Thanks.

Sharky Laguana: Yeah. And I'll just jump in with a question. Michael, I haven't seen anywhere else a study on this, but I'd be interested in seeing it. And I'm interested to—I'm curious about how they broke out different cohorts of users. I can just tell you from the perspective of my industry, obviously travel is not charging at home. And they're going to be completely 100% reliant on some kind of street or public charging.

And I think we've talked earlier about how we're a little bit of a leading edge here in terms of getting others to adopt. And so, I'm thinking about as we're modeling out use cases, are we also consider—I guess that's the charge of this group is to think about it's not merely measuring the state of where we're at but also how does where we're at change where we're headed. And so, I just want to make that point.

Rachael Sack: OK, Lara.

Lara Chaco: Yeah. Just—I would quickly add that it definitely seems to also tie into the crosscutting issue of equity. And so, to John's point if we're saturating, this would be buyers who can charge at home. And as we're looking at where are we going next, I think there's a real analysis or at least look that's needed at how are we addressing that equity issue because we know that the folks that can't charge at home and don't have the ability to charge at home, that, that ties directly into equity. So, I think it would be interesting to look at that as we start to look at this next phase.

Rachael Sack: Great. I don't see any other hands raised. So, if your hand is raised, please speak up. OK. Rachael, do you want—I can pull up our discussion slides if you'd like to set the stage.

Rachael Nealer: Yes. Thank you so much. Well, really great updates, folks. Lots of really exciting activity happening in the subcommittees. I'm really glad that you've been able to find the time to meet regularly and bring some other folks in to get presentations, for example. So, love to see that we are continuing this level of engagement in between meetings, not just at the meetings itself. So, really excited to jump into this discussion.

I think we've had quite a wide range of discussion already but would like to focus in on a couple specific goals. So, one is what I introduced earlier in this meeting, which is recommendation memos. So, now that we've heard from the subcommittees, what they've been working on, I hope that maybe you have a couple ideas in mind about specific products that are small enough in scope or defined enough in scope that maybe we could move forward with a recommendation memo.

And before I get too far, I'm going to go through the rest of the goals. But I do have a little bit of a proposal for that recommendation memo. So, I want to talk about what fits right now with where we are in running through that process. And then I also wanted to make sure that we had time because we've heard it now in a couple of different meetings. And now that we're starting to really get down into the details of things and we've had it now come up through the subcommittee updates as well, what are these KPIs and metrics? How do we want to build them out across the subcommittees? How do we want to build them out in the subcommittees? And I think that ties a lot to some of the overarching goals that we also have started discussing in the Q&A of these subcommittees.

And then just a catch all for any other logistics, anything that you think you need from this working group moving forward, we've had the Volpe team and supporting staff start coming to more of the regular subcommittee meetings and providing notes. I think this type of meeting is really important to have regularly so that we are cross-pollinating the ideas across the subcommittees and we're not just working in silos.

And so, we want to make sure that you guys are feeling supported there. I imagine that—and I have a little bit of a proposal of how we might be able to support the recommendation process. But imagine that there's probably still more to be wanted out of the support of the work that we're doing here. We can discuss it, but we also have to play within the bounds. I want to make sure that you guys are feeling really empowered and responsible for the work and that we're not crossing too many lines as far as government recommendations to the government.

So, that's why I'm really putting it back on this group to discuss more holistically what the KPIs might be, what the metrics might be, and then even what the recommendation we might want to do. If there is a point at which you want, you feel like more guidance from the government, whether it's the chairs of the EV working group or whether it's kind of a staff that can support it, let's continue to discuss that as well because the main goal here is to make sure that we're all working well together. And I recognize that's going to be a bit of a dance between flexibility and structure.

All right. Do we want to jump into what we've prepared for the memo process? So, this is a reminder from the last meeting that we had, the product process spectrum that I had proposed in terms of what I thought some of the products could be coming out of this EV working group, everything from a memo, which is a relatively small scope, short timeline to develop and get approved, and would answer specific questions or offer feedback all the way up to a more comprehensive report that probably takes much longer to develop, probably requires more input, maybe even requires its own analysis.

And so my proposal here is that because of the urgency of where we are in the electrification market, I think the more we could develop memos and have some bit-sized pieces that we could really define quickly and answer quickly, we could actually help us build out a repository of recommendations instead of waiting for a very comprehensive report in the long-term to answer all of the questions that we have about electrification. So, my proposal here in this meeting is now that we have the structure of our EV working group set up and recognizing that it's not absolutely perfect—and there are clearly some things that we need to discuss of what we might not be working on if we aren't working together as a full group and instead of in subcommittees. But my proposal here is, if you go to the next slide, is really to try this proposal– or sorry, this memo out.

So, I've defined it in two kind of different ways based on the first report that we got approved. And on the left side is the process that I think would be helpful for us to wrap our heads around. And then the proposed roles on the right side, recognizing that you've got some staff time here, but that a lot of us are also volunteering our time or this is a part of our day job. It's not our full day job. And so, I think just being very clear about roles and responsibilities going into this process will help us in the long run.

But essentially what I'm suggesting is let's, based on the conversation that we've had so far, identify probably one to three questions that we think might be bit-sized enough that we actually develop the next EV working group's agenda around deliberating on those recommendations and coming to agreement, which requires a majority vote. There can be a minority report if there are people that want to write up their disagreement with the recommendation. But we're shooting for a majority. I would obviously love to see much more than a majority because I think there's a lot of power in something more on the side of consensus than just majority.

But, really, here I'm thinking about: let's identify a question. Let's have the subcommittees draft up some of the content of that memo. Actually, looks like the medium- and heavy-duty subcommittee has a lot of content already that perhaps we could prioritize or repurpose. I do think that there could be some staff resources dedicated to drafting and editing those drafts, especially if we want to get together as a subcommittee to discuss it. And then the discussion is what is drafted up.

I don't want to commit too many resources of subject matter experts on developing this because I really want it to be the voice of the EV working group and not just regurgitated staff opinions on things. We want it to be from you guys. So, I think it would be totally fine in order to get to that draft if we had a couple of discussions, very similar to how we did the first report where we had discussions about the priorities, and then we documented that in a draft, circulated it, people reviewed it, and then approved it. So that seems like a decent process so far. So, I think we could absolutely dedicate some staff resources to that. But we will need the subject matter expertise on the subcommittees and from the EV working group members in order to make this really a finely tuned document.

Then once the subcommittee has been able to develop the content, they would obviously iterate on that and would get really comfortable as a subcommittee then giving it to the EV working group membership. And that's when we start the deliberation. So, really want subcommittee to have majority at least as well to move forward with proposing this EV working group.

The working group membership, we do have to deliberate publicly. And so that's why I think we should really consider developing the next agenda around one or a couple of these products, spend some time deliberating that as we did the first report where we adjudicated all of the comments, and then we go up for a membership vote, and then there's some processing on the back end as far as communicating internally to the secretaries and then posting it on our website, which again, the staff could really provide a lot of that support in terms of making sure it gets to the right people and that it gets on the website.

So, just to reiterate some of the roles here that I think the majority of the work would fall to the subcommittees, which it sounds like you guys are doing a lot of really great work anyways and having lots of great discussions, so I see this more as a roll of documenting what you guys are already pulling together. The subcommittee would then approve it. They would hopefully help on any final edits just in terms of lending, subject matter expertise, making sure we have the right words.

The staff can help with drafting and documenting anything, doing any copy editing as we did the first report, making sure everything's consistent within the draft, delivering it to the secretaries, posted it on our website. And then the memberships role here would be reviewing it and editing it and then doing the final approval to make it public. Any questions? Anything I may be missing that you guys think should be included in this? Any major concerns with this proposal?

Sharky Laguana: Rachael, I think this is a great proposal. Does the working group need to vote on this as a process or can it just be by acclamation?

Rachael Nealer: I think it can just be an agreement. This is probably a very clean version of the process. It's probably going to get a little bit messier than what is laid out here. But I think this is just for us to bounce ideas off of and get general approval to move forward with something like this. Mayor Giles.

John Giles: Rachael, I just want to endorse this idea. I mean, this is such a timely topic. And we need to be—I mean, we can either be very relevant in discussing the obvious issues that are being debated all over our country or if this group ends up being something that issues a report every year or two, I mean, what a lost opportunity that would be. So, I think this is—I just want to wholeheartedly endorse what you're talking about. I think the problem is going to be limiting it to three or four topics, I mean, because there's the laundry list of things that are timely and that ought to be discussed.

But so, I'm looking forward to having that conversation. And how do we prioritize what are the issues that we want to get offer some guidance on at this point? And then once we do, I think we need to do press releases about it, and we need to be part of the national conversation and provide some expertise to help change hearts and minds and continue in this campaign that we're on to electrify the country. So I'm excited about what you're talking about.

Rachael Nealer: Thanks, [INAUDIBLE]. Michael.

Michael Berube: Quick question on just when you mentioned doing one the next meeting. Do you mean one memo that might have 10 or 15 recommendations in it or one recommendation?

Rachael Nealer: I think it depends on how we define the memo. I can imagine a couple recommendations under a similar topic. I do want to caution us to walk before we run. So, I don't want to necessarily try to boil the whole ocean here with all of the recommendations. I think I have a list of a couple things that I've heard throughout that feel a little bit ripe for this, but I don't think all of our ideas feel right for this.

So, one thing I want to do with this is quickly get some recommendations, but I also want to prove out this process to see how long it takes us to do this because I think that will then help us then identify future memos and recommendations and how we can expeditiously make those recommendations because a lot of this is in timing, too, is making sure that we're answering these questions quickly. And so, if we can run this process very efficiently this first time and then continue to improve on that, then we could, I think, get more towards what Mayor Giles was saying in terms of being really relevant and being a voice in this space. But I don't know how long this process takes, yet. And so, I want to make sure that we are doing something that is relatively smooth to start.

Michael Berube: Yeah. I did here, just like [INAUDIBLE] had said, they had 10 or 12 specific things they were working on it probably heard quite a few there it—a suggestion might be since you don't know how long you could actually grind yourself down a long time like working on one or two might not take you actually—may or may not take you might want to do more. I would suggest that you might add a piece up front where if the subcommittee shared with the full group, hey, here's the 15 things we're thinking a sentence or two, whatever they have.

Then other people could then be—one, we identified a lot of things cut across. So, rather than having one subcommittee work for months and months and then have someone say, oh, here's a study that actually shows something completely different—like, oh, I wish I would have had that right. So, share that up front. Maybe there's a little cross chatter that goes in sharing data, information that could short circuit it might help.

It also might help you then see what's the total list because we didn't really get that today. So, get your full list, 20 items. People think 30. Then think, OK, which of these might be ripe or not? Maybe it's two or three. Maybe it's 5 or 10. Some might be really easy recommendations that people say, yeah. So, that might help us go a little faster. Then you can do meetings. Again, they have to be public. But you can do those as notice them and say, OK, we're going to have a set up just to run through these really quick.

Rachael Nealer: Yep. Thanks for those additions, Michael. Sharky and then Rakesh.

Sharky Laguana: Yeah. I'm just thinking through what Michael just said as—so, first of all, I agree with you about not boiling the ocean and walking before we run. I think all of that's really well said. I'm thinking about how do we curate—from where I sit, you're well positioned to be the curator, I guess. But I'd be interested in hearing what the other working group members think and feel about that.

There's also, I guess, a question in my head about high level versus granular. I can see value to both approaches. For instance, Rakesh had just an incredibly—a wonderfully detailed list of recommendations. I'm sure folks that I'm familiar with want a chance to look through those recommendations and would probably support many, if not all of them. But I'm curious how you're thinking about whether a memo would go to that level of granularity or are you thinking more just higher-level secretary? Just give me a sense, I guess, of how you're thinking about how this might plug into the secretary's working process.

RACHAEL NEALER: Yeah. I mean, I think that's up for us to decide as a group. It's going to have to be a balance. I do think that we don't need to limit ourselves to the high-level executive nature of delivering a memo to the secretaries because once that memo is delivered, that's where the agencies that they oversee can start to take action. And the more that we can give the Joint Offices and the Vehicle Technologies Office and FHWAs things to do and specific recommendations, I think, the better. So, I would imagine it being a high-level executive recommendation that is summarized and then maybe a little bit of detail under that.

I also have to say that the more detailed we make the recommendations, the more difficult it will be to get consensus. And so I think we have to balance that, too. And this is exactly—I love all of these questions. I think these are difficult questions to answer without examples. And so, that's why I want to really push us to—even though it might be a little uncomfortable—push us to moving forward to the next step—start documenting some of the ideas that we have and figure out what is something that we would feel comfortable putting in a recommendation document to the secretaries. And then I think there's a little bit of we'll know it when we see it that will happen or at least it will require a majority of us to know it when we see it. Rakesh.

Rakesh Aneja: Yeah. Firstly, in general, I agree with, Rachael—your comments and Michael's comments as well. I'm excited about the proposal for this memo process and the spirit of getting some things accomplished quickly and also recognizing we have a diverse stakeholder group here, and maybe some of these topics may take a while to align. Others may be a little bit quicker.

So, the thought that came to mind—and I think it was on the lines of what Michael was stating in terms of how do we among the subcommittees and as part of the EV working group are aligning on which topics to go after without making which topics to prioritize? Let me put it this way without making it a laborious process even within the policy recommendation document and the MDHD subcommittee, we were thinking of, maybe a categorization of this could be a low effort, high impact type of an item, which then makes it a higher priority, a low-hanging fruit, and we use that term within our subcommittee as well.

And, again, without making it a laborious process, but something along those lines, does it make sense for the subcommittees to align on quickly? And that gives us our top three, five, 10 items to go after as part of the process.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, I was thinking the same, Rakesh, is we do have to figure out—and I think your group, your subcommittee, medium and heavy duty, is a perfect example. There's a lot of material there, but how do we prioritize it? And then once we do prioritize it, how do we prioritize it amongst the other priorities of the other subcommittees? So, let us go back to the drawing board a little bit.

I don't think we have quite the—the time to do super high or do kind of put all the ideas out on the table and then start down selecting. So, maybe what we can do is go back to the drawing table and figure out if there's a way that in the next week or two, recognizing there's a federal holiday this week, that maybe we can come up with a bit of a brainstorm activity for this group to do offline. And then once we have the ideas on the table, then people can start prioritizing. We can see which ones as a group, they rise to the top. Does that make sense?

Rakesh Aneja: Yes, thank you. Couldn't unmute fast enough.

Rachael Nealer: John.

John Bozzella: Yeah. So, it's a great process. I just I think as we're thinking about this at the subcommittee level and in the full committee level, I think we have to reflect on what makes this group different because there are lots of groups in our overall space that have exhaustive lists of policy recommendations, for example. And so, one of the questions that we think have to ask ourselves is that our highest and best use, which is to create a series of policy recommendations or is our highest and best use to identify what the critical high level policy levers ought to be and then maybe concentrate on certain other things that we can do given our convening power.

So, I just put that out there because this is I spend a lot of time at the intersection of policy and innovation. And this is a different group than that. And so, we should figure out what is the highest and best use of this group.

Rachael Nealer: It's a good point, John. Can you give me some examples that fall outside of policy recommendations that you think?

John Bozzella: Yeah, so, a couple of examples. So, Rakesh mentioned total cost of ownership. Some of those recommendations were policy and some of them were not. It was more along the lines of how how we need to be thinking about what the drivers are–

Rachael Nealer: Yeah

John Bozzella: —in medium and heavy duty. Another example would be the NEVI minimum standards. We're not making a policy recommendation. We're trying to figure out how to increase the customer experience and the data sharing experience of charging across the charging network. It could be policy in the form of a requirement or a regulation, but it could also be a capital discussion or another type of convening discussion.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I take policy a little bit more broadly to be kind of government actions as opposed to just the regulatory side of things, but totally appreciate that. I actually have here in my notes, too—I've heard a number of people talking about mythbusting. too. Like, does this EV working group need to be a source of mythbusting that people can trust?

John Bozzella: Education awareness, yes. Yeah.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, John. Charles.

Charles T. Brown: Yes. Good afternoon. I like that a process has been identified. And I can respect and understand the sense of urgency. I am, however, concerned, though, with the sense of urgency, considering that we've made an explicit statement around drafting a short memo without sort of short being defined. I think a comprehensive memo is more sufficient than short, considering that we have to think about the long-term consequences of our decisions and our recommendations. So. at a minimum, I think it would behoove us to state that some sort of pros and cons should be mentioned within those memos to help us make a quicker decision than normal.

Rachael Nealer: OK. Thanks, Charles. Mark.

Mark Dowd: OK. Just to build a little bit on what John was saying, I support that approach, that it doesn't have to be just policy recommendations, that we have the convening power to run to ground some of the technical issues, run the ground some of the community issues. And it would be—sometimes the foxes go off on a tangent because they're trying to just make policy recommendations. We have the opportunity to have a strong impact on the technical issues, too.

Rachael Nealer: Great Thanks, Mark. All right. We have a little bit more time for discussion. I'd love to use this as an opportunity to start to brainstorm maybe some things that people heard in the subcommittee, just updates on where you think—well, I guess a couple different things.

One is maybe some of the ideas that we can take some notes on and circulate and add to later because I want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to contribute. And some of this might come after processing some of what we've heard today. But would love to discuss maybe some low-hanging fruit that the subcommittee might have that they think would be good for a memo. And then also get a sense of how do we balance the workload? Because if we have three different subcommittees working on three different memos that have 10 recommendations each, that means that 30 recommendations need to be reviewed by the full membership. And I just want to be very, very strategic about how we do that, especially the first time so that we're not slowing ourselves down.

So, I don't know if some of the subcommittees want to weigh in or maybe the leads want to weigh in on whether they think their subcommittee will be ready to make some of those recommendations, what off the top of their head might they might have, some of those recommendations. I know medium- and heavy-duty subcommittee can circulate some of the ideas that you've been working on.

And then we also have the KPI and metrics discussion that we want to talk about. So, we want to make sure that we have a little bit of time for that as well. Nadia.

Nadia El Mallakh: Yeah, I certainly think carrying the report outs and we do connect once a month a subcommittee leads but getting a little this was this was great because it provided a little bit more substantive detail. I think for the grid subcommittee—and others can feel free to chime in here– I mean, we've already identified managed charging is a focus area. So, I would just throw that out to the other subcommittees as a potential area for us to focus on. But I think infrastructure, we hear that continuously. All of the groups talk about that. So, I definitely think as a global bucket, infrastructure should be included or at least there's an opportunity to probably coalesce there. So, we've talked about bridge interim solutions. That's one area I've heard come up in a variety today and a variety of discussions.

I also think understanding it's come up also various times of the need for certainty and the discrepancy between the timing and some of the costs. So, does a utility go out and build? We know that that's a challenge with the regulators. We've seen it actually be rejected here recently by some jurisdictions where it's kind of surprising. We've seen other ways it's been successful. So, something about—is there even a way to interpret existing regulations or rules that could help with some of that funding or some processes there. So, that'd be what I would throw out just from the grid side. But I'd be curious if other members have other themes that came up. But I think we'd be ready to jump on those areas.

Rachael Nealer: Awesome. Thanks. Michael.

Michael Berube: I thinking about John's comment about the value of recommendations from this group, one added place where there could be value is there may be something that doesn't seem controversial. Maybe it's happening. But this group emphasizing this is really important. And this particular thing is going well. And that's going to be a critical piece for ongoing success, so which might be some of the lowest hanging fruit, things that seem a little obvious. But the power of this group, it's a very diverse group, brings lots of different members together. Having agreement from group like this insulates it from that. That issues only the opinion of special group X, Y, or Z. Well, no, you got the whole cross-section here.

Rachael Nealer: Good point, Michael. Dean.

Dean Bushey: Yeah. I'm going to double click on what Nadia just said—that grid readiness and grid integration. How could we work with utilities, work with the local regulators to want to say prebuild but aligned the regulations or good give recommendations to the policymakers so that the grid is more ready. That would be a really low-hanging fruit for me from the medium duty, heavy duty. And you can read through the rest of her reactions. I think you spell it out really well, but that one really resonated across all groups.

Rachael Nealer: Right. Thanks, Dean. All right. Well, I might wrap up this conversation because I really like Lara's suggestion in the chat to have subcommittees draft a short problem statements that then we can maybe weigh as the working group on how to write up a recommendation memo. And like Michael said, perhaps some of these recommendations might be cross-cutting and/or connected to each other in which it would lend itself nicely to a cohesive memo that has a couple different recommendations from different subcommittees. So, really like that idea.

And I also want to make sure that we spend time talking about KPIs and metrics because I hear from you guys that that's coming up regularly. And want to discuss what the path forward is for developing those KPIs and metrics across the subcommittees and within the subcommittees. And one of the things that I wanted to make sure that happened in this meeting was that we weren't—while I think the endeavor to draw up these metrics and agree to some KPIs is really useful. I also don't want it to stand in the way of us making recommendations because that I think is really the ultimate value of this federal advisory committee.

But I do want to make sure that we're addressing the KPIs, that we are all on the same page about, what we want to tackle, and how we want to move the needle. So, actually, Rachael, if you don't mind, if you could go back up to the Secretary's Charge, I think that's a good place to start. And I think that's Slide six. There you go.

Rachael Sack: You see it?

Rachael Nealer: Yes. Thanks, Rachael. So, I mean, part of our charge is to develop goals and metrics and then actionable recommendations. So, how are we tackling each one of those. We develop the subcommittee structure. So, that we can go a little bit deeper and organize ourselves in a way that is a little bit more manageable than the larger working group all working on the same thing. We can also get more done if we divide and conquer a little bit and lend our expertise to these subcommittees. But I think, ultimately, we do need some goals and metrics for those subcommittees, but then some goals and metrics for the EV working group overall as well.

And some of the things that I heard throughout the conversation were things like EV sales, That's going to be a metric—an indicator—for what we're trying to achieve as the widespread vehicle electrification. EV charging numbers is also something to track. And we've got lots of private and public funding going into those EV chargers. So, I'd love to just hear how people are thinking about KPIs. I know, John, you've been thinking a lot about it. And I know the medium and heavy duty team have pulled together the framework. So, I'd love to just give the space to share how thinking maybe has evolved now that we're getting more and more into the details of the work. John.

John Bozzella: So, I think so a little bit process as well as substance. OK, from a process perspective, I thought the process Dean outlined was exactly the right process. And because it had the—and maybe we need to be a little bit more explicit about it. The idea is there's a framework. We have themes about how we think about what is necessary to achieve the goals laid out, for example, in the blueprint,

The goals are already established. The goals have been established by through the blueprint. The goals have been established by various regulatory actions. So, we know what the goals are. Question is, how do we get there? And how do we measure whether we're on track? And I thought that the work that Heinrich did to create that framework is right and that the work we need to do and that we've started to do is that each subcommittee contributes to it at a macro level, at a macro level. In other words, what are the ways to measure success toward that ambition? Whatever it is, 50% by 2030, if you're talking about the light-duty ambition, for example.

What we have agreed to do is have one person from each subcommittee, I think it, Dean it's Heinrich for you is going to represent each of the subcommittees to develop, to build out that framework and to literally fill in that template. So, Dina, am I saying it right? I mean, that that's—I think. And then the idea would be Dean and Nadia and I would have an ongoing conversation. Yeah, it's going well, or it's not going well, or these are the areas of disagreement. But to me, that's what I think the initial metrics conversation has to be. It's the macro level.

And then I would defer obviously to Nadia with regard to what are the grid specific metrics and to Dean and co with regard to what are the medium and heavy-duty specific metrics. But there is a high-level question, which is what the things you've just listed Rachel raise.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah. Great. So, is the next step a matter of sharing the framework that the medium and heavy-duty subcommittee pulled together and having each of the subcommittees noodle on that framework and what they want to submit as the macro? How do people feel about subcommittees having more detailed level tracking as well? Is it needed? Is that going to help organizationally? Nadia.

Nadia El Mallakh: I would vote yes. I think the idea of having one person on each committee who is really charged with being the owner of the KPIs ideally it'd be the same person for, I think, the macro and then also for the subcommittee. Maybe it can be two, but I do think there has to be somebody who's focused on that because otherwise, it just you're moving pretty quickly and then breaking down these very big picture objectives into tangible, actionable items. I think, for example, when think about our subcommittee, like what do we need to do this year by when as we're thinking through tying back up to understanding the larger KPIs? So, I would vote yes.

Rachael Nealer: Great. Yeah, just want to make sure that we're all on the same page. OK. Sounds great. So, it sounds like we've got a lot of really great actionable next steps. So, big thanks to the subcommittees who've been working hard on pulling these frameworks together, pulling the presentations together, having the discussions on a regular cadence.

We will make sure that we're circulating and putting on huddle the framework for KPIs and metrics, and then maybe there's some discussion once we have pulled together that we can have discussion in it in the next meeting, make sure that we're not missing anything at the macro level, and then the subcommittees can meet to decide what goes into their specific subcommittee trackers as well. And then we are going to share the recommendations that we might have coming out of the subcommittees that are relatively ready for pulling together into an EV working group memo that we could submit and move forward to the Secretary's. So, this is really great.

Rachael Sack: OK. Well, I'm glad there was so much progress made in those discussions. Do we—before we transition to our comment period, Rachel, do we need to talk about the next meeting? Any further next steps? Any other logistics before we conclude with the public?

Rachael Nealer: Yeah. So, I think our public comment period starts in a short amount of time here at 4:30. So, let's maybe try to get some of the logistics out of the way so we can end the meeting quickly after the public comment closes. So, I do think we—it sounds like we want to meet again relatively soon to discuss the KPIs, metrics, and the recommendations. We will provide an update very soon on next steps for prioritizing what we think might go into the recommendation memo.

I think our legislative legislatively directed to meet every 120 days. And so, our next meeting we were thinking sometime around September. If it is a deliberation meeting where we're discussing the recommendation memo, I'm really a big proponent of scheduling it around when we think that's going to be ready so that we're using the time that we get together as a group very effectively and not too early or too late after that process. So, we can maybe think about how long it'll take us to develop that draft and then schedule a meeting around that. Anyone have any major concerns with the September time frame? Dean.

Dean Bushey: Yeah. So, my question was related to administratively. It looks like a lot of this can be done via email. So, we socialize some of the topics. I just wanted to make sure administratively we can socialize, get it ready for discussion. Is that allowed within the framework?

Rachael Nealer: Yes. So, we can get it ready, just like we did the first report. We got it ready. We had everybody comment on it. But then we needed to adjudicate the comments in the membership meeting. The subcommittee is able to get it ready, get it approved through the subcommittee to then deliver to the EV working group for that review. We can also circulate the comments from the subcommittee—or from the EV working group members ahead of the meeting so everyone knows the list of comments going into the meeting and then we adjudicate it in a meeting.

One of my follow-up questions is going to be, do we want to do that in person or do we think it's a good idea to maybe try to do some virtual adjudication, even shorter than meetings like this where we can schedule them a couple of meetings in advance so that we have a lot of opportunities to talk through recommendations and make sure that we're making movement on them?

Michael Berube: I think that would be an excellent idea, Rachael, like doing some earlier where you get them on the calendar because waiting three months where you can really have next step because it sounds like there's going to be a step. What's this total list of things we have? How close are we? What do we think? One hour conversation could like go a long way since—and honestly, adjudicating word by word live in the meeting is a challenge. It might be better to get people's thoughts. If you have more frequent meetings, you can get anyone's input.

Tell two people, OK, you two have the most knowledge and thoughts and different views on this. You guys go off, come up with a recommendation, send it to us. We're going to meet in a month and vote on it. And then you're not having 50 people sit and listen to what else.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah. I like it. And we can always—so, the logistically tricky part about having these meetings is that we actually have to put them in the Federal Register 30 days in advance. But what we could do is we could set up a series of them and put them in the Federal Register. And then if we don't need to meet, we don't need to meet. But at least then we have it covered, and we can meet if the time is right. Cool. Sounds great.

So, then we can work towards maybe—I also know that September–October frame is the end in beginning of the fiscal year for the government. So, maybe we set up a series of virtual meetings for this quarter and then get back together in the fall after the beginning of the fiscal year.

I also have seen a number of presentations happening across subcommittees. That seems to be a great way to get some more input from folks. So, as long as you all are OK with it, I think really focusing in on the recommendations and the memo right now and trying to prove that out seems to be like a really, really good specific goal for us. And if we need to get any presentations or any input based on those recommendations, we can work to line those up.

But otherwise, I think the more we can just focus on this recommendation memo or couple memos, I think that could that could really be useful. So, maybe use the subcommittees as ways to continue to meet with external stakeholders, especially as new reports come out and might inform the working group thinking and evolution. Does that sound good to folks put the presentations on subcommittees on an ad hoc basis and focus internally for a little bit? All right.

Well, I think we logistically have our next steps. We will summarize this. And I don't know that—we'll see what we can pull together ahead of the holiday. But if it doesn't pop into your inbox until next week, don't be surprised with the federal holiday in the middle of the week. OK, great.

Rachael Sack: Well, then we are right on time to move on to the last portion for today's meeting, and that is the public comment period. So, at this time, we're going to open the meeting to hear public comments. If you are interested in speaking, please raise your hand using the icon at the bottom of your screen. Each individual will have two minutes to share your comment. When I call your name, you can then unmute yourself and feel free to turn your video on.

If we do make it through, if we do not make it through all of the raised hands, we encourage you to submit written statements that can be sent to the working group's email address, which is evwg@ee.doe.gov or via email to Rachael Miller as described in the Federal Register. So, any statements not received within 10 days—any statements received within 10 days will be included in the meeting notes to be posted to our website.

So, at this time, are there any public attendees who would like to share a comment? And, team, I see no hands raised, but if you do, let me know.

Julie Nixon: We do have a few hands.

Rachael Nealer: Yep. I see a couple. Rachel, do you want me to just go through them?

Rachael Sack: Oh, now they appeared. OK, great. Thank you. I see three, magically. Thanks, everyone. All right. Samantha Ortega, we'll start with you. Feel free to come on video if you so choose. Otherwise, you can begin and unmute yourself, and I'll start your two minutes.

Samantha Ortega: All right. Thank you, Rachel. Samantha here with charger help. Thank you all for providing such a wonderful presentation. And I missed quite a bit because I had to step away. But I wanted to comment on the charging network subcommittee to the recommendation to propose to be adopted nationwide. I think that's a great idea. I would add with the caveat that depending on how the Joint Office and the ChargeX consortium is incorporating hardware related issues, we understand that is a huge component of determining uptime. And we believe that states should be supporting that hardware related issues to be reported into the uptime formula.

And I'll just point to the Maryland reliability standards. They are doing a great job. They just presented the utilities, presented a business plan that would– that is the closest that we think hardware related issues are captured. So, I can send more information on that. But that would be– that's my recommendation. And again, thank you for the presentation.

Rachael Sack: Thank you, Samantha. Chelsea Valentine, you are welcome to unmute yourself and come on video if you so choose. You can begin when you're ready.

Chelsea Valentine: Hi. My name is Chelsea Valentine. I live in Racine, Wisconsin. And I'm just a regular person, but I do work at an asphalt plant as a quality control technician. So, I am really interested in the energy transition, which brought me to you guys. And so, I don't have too much to input on some of the stuff you guys are coming up with. But I do just want to cheerlead on everything that you guys are doing and say that I do have an EV. I have an e-bike and don't think that, as mentioned, enough how micro EVs are also EVs and don't need a special charger. It's funny walking around campus with my battery sometimes, but you gotta do what you gotta do. So, I just want to put that in there.

When it comes to—I'm car-free at the moment, but am shopping for a car and because I live in an apartment, it's a quad that is really common in my City of Racine. There is—sorry, my time is going off. I'm in the lab right now. But there is an issue with charging because I live in an apartment, and so obviously that's going to be a hangup as you guys already mentioned, with renters not purchasing electric cars. But it is on my mind constantly trying to think of workarounds and charging the car. But so far since I work in Racine, it's about a 45-minute beautiful ride in the morning, and I usually ride before the sun comes up, so there's no cars trying to kill me.

But it is really interesting to think about micro EVs as well. And I know you guys have talked about that and other things because I did catch up on your last meeting today and then just binged your other meetings and got lucky enough to catch this one. But I just wanted to hear you guys on. I'm probably running close to my time. So, I just wanted to put it out there you guys are really great leaders, and listening to how you guys run this meeting is truly inspiring. And you guys are rock stars, so keep it up. And I'll keep following you guys. Thank you.

Rachael Sack: Great. Thank you. I saw one other hand. Here we go. I don't know if it's a glitch on my end, but Lala, Lala is there someone else with a hand raise that you'd like to comment? Anyone else with a hand raised?

Lala Agamiro-nost: Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

Rachael Sack: There are people—oh, oh.

Lala Agamiro-nost: OK.

Rachael Nealer: Yes, we can hear you.

Lala Agamiro-nost: You hear me. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for excellent presentation. Very informative. Thank you so much. It is my concern and it is what I want to actually to say. We have a lot of problems.

Rachael Sack: Is there someone speaking now?

Lala Agamiro-nost: A lot of topics were adapted and many components were put together. And as Rakesh, a major, if I am pronouncing it right, he advised that any integration technology for refueling will be very useful. And he mentioned hydrogen technology.

We all know about hydrogen technology. I am presenting first time in North America a new technology based on energy materials. I am receiving many emails from different energy sectors and from CAP as well. I submit a five-year proposal with CAP at 25 30. And what is it kind of materials? They produce free electricity under any kind of pressure, vibration, motion. And such electricity, unfortunately were wasted.

And now—actually, it is not now. It is about 10 years ago—with NASA, where it created [INAUDIBLE] materials, very light, like benders, actuators. And there is array of such materials and embedded into the tire. If you just driving, you produce clean electricity without any chemistry involving. We know that [INAUDIBLE] introduced a lot of challenging to solve and chemist and I know what does it mean. Here, just the pressure, vibration, motion, and you have free electricity just driving the car. Two countries in the world successful in that materials. And, of course, it must be international collaboration.

So, would you be—or whom can talk about that? Maybe you can advise me—I know there is that alliance for automation, innovation, or work team—to collaborate because in one month or two months, they will reconsider or consider this new projects for five fiscal years.

Rachael Nealer: Hey, Lala. Thank you so much for your comment. This is Rachel. If you're looking to get connected to someone, if you want to email evwg@ee.doe.gov with your request, we can make sure if we can't answer the question ourselves, we can send it to someone on that. We hope to be able to. Thank you. Looks like we have one more hand up. Tom Shields.

Tom Shields: Hey, thank you. Appreciate you guys making the time for public commentary. Just wanted to say I enjoyed listening to how the working group is thinking about this. And the discussion is being undertaken, and decisions are being made at the highest level. Just maybe we need to do a little bit more work into everyone's background. But it seemed like private land ownership was noticeably absent from the discussion. And as someone who's representing private landowners who want to participate in the energy transition, I'd like to throw my hat in the ring. But I'm sure you– might have already been thought about. So, thought I'd ask the question just to understand how private landowners are being represented and who might be representing them.

Rachael Nealer: Thanks, Tom. Thanks for your comment. And you're talking about land ownership. Is that what you said?

Tom Shields: Yeah, exactly. Just if they're looking to develop charging stations on their properties and things like that, just to get a sense of how they might be thinking about it and be involved in the discussion of the group.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah, absolutely. I do think it is an important aspect of EVs, especially EV charging. We can share with you the representation that the legislative language set out for us for the EV working group that does have realty, I believe on it. So, we can share that with the members that represent those categories. We do have full membership right now, but if you're interested, you can also email evwg@ee.doe.gov. And if there's any openings you can be considered.

Tom Shields: OK. Awesome. Thank you.

Rachael Nealer: Thank you. All right. We've got Elaine Cooper.

Elaine Cooper: Yes. I have a question. I've been an EV owner for quite a few years. And I was involved in a collision not of my fault on Martin Luther King Day and discovered that insurance companies in South Carolina do not cover the repairs or check up on your EV. And for anyone who has an EV who's been involved in a collision, you would know that your EV shuts down.

And also, the education for services is totally lacking in South Carolina. This occurred in downtown Columbia area near two blocks from the capitol. And we had to wait something like—a minimum four hours as each tow service did not believe that our EV had totally shut down and set the wrong service to tow. And, of course, our insurance company did not ended up not covering the cost of our EV to be checked out. Only the bodywork of the other gas-powered van that had slammed their car sliding door into my EV.

So, I just thought to make everyone aware, if you're interested in making it easier for the public to access and use EVs throughout our state, those are two practical points that you might want to pursue. And could you please send me if you know any insurance companies that do cover the cost of having your EV checked out? Because it's very, very harsh.

Rachael Nealer: Yeah.

Elaine Cooper: Harsh [INAUDIBLE].

Rachael Nealer: Thank you. Thank you, Elaine, for your comment. Sorry to hear about your accident. That's a big bummer. But definitely something we need to think comprehensively about in the EV working group or the electric vehicle space altogether is how we integrate this new technology into our existing systems. So, thanks for raising that to our attention. Brian Robb.

Braian Robb: Yeah. Hi, everybody. I'm Brian Robb, the director of government relations with Lion Electric. We're an OEM of school buses, all electric school buses, and class five through eight trucks. Thanks to the Joint group—Joint Office for putting this on today and for organizing this overview, there's been a lot of really useful information that has been given. I just want to touch really quickly on just the overall discussion on medium heavy duty vehicle EV adoption.

This whole group knows that it is a different animal than light duty adoption. And most notably, and it has been touched on a few times already today was getting closer to price parity. And obviously the costs of an electric school bus or class six or seven truck is still significantly higher than their ice counterpart. And to get towards that price parity, there are obviously historic federal programs all over the place right now that would be like Clean School bus program. That's $5 billion. The ports program is $3 billion. There's another clean, heavy duty billion that's out right now. There's, of course, NEVI. It's all over the place.

What we have noticed, though, and I think it's worth being touched upon is that companies that are and not just lion like green power proterra, those that are 100% ZEV have been, I don't want to say left out, but there's been a little bit of some issues with some of these programs, even though the funding is fantastic and anyone that knows that's been involved in federal government is that, that much money coming out the door for green programs is not the norm. So, we want to take advantage of those programs as much as humanly possible over the next three to five years, seven years before they sunset because you never know with appropriation.

So, we want to make sure that there is no snapback whatsoever with those programs and that they have the hardest hitting impact they can possibly have so five years from now when the Clean School Bus program is over, we don't say, yeah, that's great. We had a couple thousand EV buses come out and let's go back to selling 99% ice engine. So, I think some of these programs, unintentionally, I don't want to say favor the fossil fuel industry, but they there are large legacy fossil fuel OEMs that are being awarded the same amounts or larger amounts of money in comparison to, again, not just Lion to a bunch of other 100% ZEV medium, heavy duty manufacturers.

And I think it's not about favoritism. We just want to make sure, again, that the programs are having the greatest amount of impact that we can possibly have with that amount of historic funding. So we're keeping an eye on that. But I think that is definitely something to consider going forward is how we construct these programs that are in place right now and programs going forward so that we make sure that 100% ZEV companies are the are the goal.

Rachael Nealer: Great. Thank you so much, Brian. Really appreciate your comments. Our charge is to get to an electrified future. So, I think we share your passion there. So, thank you for your comment. All right. Any other—Rachael Sack is having some technical issues. So, as Rachael’s seamlessly swapped places, so any other attendees public that would like to comment? I see no additional hands. Going once. Going twice. All right.

Well, that's the close of the meeting, folks, unless anyone has any questions. We've got a number of things to follow up on, which I think is great. Means we're making lots of great progress. Really appreciate everybody's time. I know it's hard to sit in front of a computer for four hours straight. So, really appreciate you guys making the time. Hope you have a great rest of the day, and we'll be in touch soon.

Rakesh Aneja: Thank you. Bye, bye.

Rachael Nealer: Thank you.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Gab Klein: That was easy.