Webinar: Resilience and Futureproofing Considerations for EV Charging Infrastructure (Text Version)

This is a text version of Webinar: Resilience and Futureproofing Considerations for EV Charging Infrastructure, presented on June 27, 2023.

Bridget Gilmore, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you taking some time out of your Tuesday, out of your busy summer schedule to join for our hour-long webinar series. We'll get started in just a couple of minutes as we let folks enter into the Zoom room. Thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. It looks like we still have folks that are trickling into the room. We're really looking forward to today's topic. We'll get started in just a moment or two. Thanks so much for joining.

OK. It looks like we're hitting a nice, steady trend. Thank you all for being here with us today. I'm Bridget Gilmore. I'm a fellow at the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Today's webinar topic is on resilience and the futureproofing considerations for EV charging infrastructure.

We'll get started by getting acclimated to the Zoom room. For any folks that aren't familiar, the controls are located at the bottom of your screen so you can toggle your cursor toward the bottom and you will see the controls pop up.

And the one you should look for is that Q&A function. So that's where we will hope you will direct your questions that you have during today's webinar. This gives the panelists an opportunity to actually respond to your question directly. So please do put your questions in that Q&A window.

As a disclaimer, this webinar is being recorded and may be posted on the Joint Office website or used internally. And if you speak during the webinar or use video, you are presumed to consent to recording and use of your voice or image.

So in terms of our agenda for today, we're going to go over a very brief introduction from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. We'll then hear a nice presentation on enhancing resilience of EV charging to really couch our discussion today. And then we'll go into panel presentations from our three presenters from Pacific Gas and Electric, the Save Energy Coalition, and EVgo.

So just a brief introduction about the Joint Office, we're still relatively new office established with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Our mission is to accelerate an electrified transportation system that's affordable, convenient, equitable, reliable, and safe. And our vision is to see a future where everyone can ride and drive electric come into fruition.

We're supporting four programs through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that are listed on the screen here. The first one is the NEVI program. This is $5 billion for building out fast charging, first and foremost, along our major alternative fuel corridors.

Then we are also supporting the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Program. The first round of funding just recently closed and had lots of interest, we're furiously reading the different applications that have come in. And then we are also supporting the Low-No Emission Grants Program for transit bus deployments. This is clean transit bus deployment funding. And then the Clean School Bus Program as well, from the U.S. EPA, and this is $5 billion in support of clean school bus deployment.

So in terms of the technical assistance, we're working with states, communities, tribal nations, transit agencies, and school districts. We also conduct one-on-one meetings with states to address any questions and concerns that they have related to the NEVI Formula Program. And we have a really great concierge service you can reach out via phone, or email, or our web form, which I'll point to, to really offer any sort of inquiry that you might have. We've got a great team that's supporting those and we'll get back to you really shortly.

So our website is driveelectric.gov. This is where you can find great resources. It's constantly being updated. We've got infrastructure planning and implementation guidance, data and tools that are frequently coming out and being updated, as well as news and events. And then our technical assistance request form, which you can find in the top right corner of the website. It looks like this. And this is where you can have your specific inquiry type routed depending on what you're interested in learning about.

And you can also subscribe to news and updates that we have from our office. This is how you can find out about new webinars that are coming out, as well as recent updates and things to keep in the know. Everything is constantly changing in this industry, as we know.

So I'll pause there and we'll offer just two polling questions so we can know who is in the room with us today. So if the folks supporting the webinar, if you wouldn't mind launching that first question. So this one is, what sector are you coming from today? So we can get a sense of the different stakeholders that we have here.
So I'll pause and give folks just a moment to fill out that question. And when it looks like we've got a critical mass. Looks like we've got one, this looks like a great distribution. A lot of folks from the utility or energy generation space, state and local governments, as well as some folks from the federal and tribal governments, thank you all so much for being here.

We can go to our next sector, or our next question. So this one is, what region of the country are you coming from today? So know that these are general groups. I know sometimes folks are looking for their specific region. So pick the one that best suits you and we'll take a moment here.

Great. Looks like a lot of folks from the Northeast, but a good distribution across. Thank you all so much. So there I will stop with the polling and we can move on to our panelists that have joined us today. Thank you all so much for being here. I'll start with some quick introductions on all the folks here.

So we've got Caley Johnson, who is a senior transportation analyst, market analyst for the National Renewable Energy Lab known as NREL. So in this role Caley assesses the economics of advanced fuel and transportation technologies in various applications, locations, and policy environments.

One of these applications is the diversification of transportation fuels and pursuit of resilience to natural disasters. Prior to working for NREL, Caley was a project manager at U.S. EPA's climate protection partnerships division and a co-founder of the solar power company, [INAUDIBLE].

Then we have Shmuel Bismuth. Shmuel is an expert grid innovation engineer at PG&E's utility partnerships and innovations group. And he is the lead engineer for several clean transportation programs, including the fleet electrification program, which will see the company electrify over 4,000 vehicles in the next seven years, which is very exciting.

Shmuel has held various positions at PG&E including distribution planning, grid operations, and grid innovation. Shmuel holds a B.S.E.E. from the Colorado School of Mines and is a registered professional engineer in the state of California.

Then there's Diego Lopez. Diego is the executive director of the Save Energy Coalition in Colorado. He is responsible for the strategic planning, stakeholder services, education and outreach, public relations, and infrastructure development programs. Diego has 12 years of experience in the energy and transportation industry.

Finally, we have Mandeep Guragain. Mandeep is a senior director of development engineering at EVgo and leads a team responsible for performing technical due diligence and infrastructure engineering for EV charging infrastructure projects.

He has over 15 years of renewable energy engineering experience and has worked for solar, battery energy storage systems, and utility projects. He holds a Master of Science in electrical engineering and is a licensed professional engineer in California as well. Great. So now I will pass it off to Caley who will start us off with our first presentation, and then we will move on from there. Thank you so much.

Caley Johnson, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Hey. Thanks, Bridget. I would like to start with just a working definition of resilience and for transportation systems. And for that I would define it as being able to evacuate people effectively before a damaging event or a natural disaster, being able to help in the recovery operations, and being able to get back to normal operations as quickly as possible.

And so EVs can increase or decrease resilience to extreme events. And the extreme events we're talking about are hurricanes, wildfires, floods, heat waves, which can be damaging on the grid and create strain on the grid, cold snaps, which can create problems with the grid also and the recharging equipment and electric vehicles, and of course cybersecurity risks. Next slide, please.

So the ways that EVs can increase resilience are by increasing fuel diversity. There have been numerous cases where a natural disaster, in this case a typhoon in Fukushima, in the upper left-hand corner, gets rid or cuts off the supply of petroleum while still enabling electricity in certain areas.

And so EVs were used for some critical usage in Fukushima after the tsunami. EVs can provide power to critical loads or buildings when the power is out. And so this photo in the middle is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle owned by PG&E that is powering one of their emergency shelters during a wildfire.

EVs can be waterproofed as you see on the lower left-hand side. Electric vehicles are the only vehicle that doesn't require oxygen because it doesn't operate on combustion. And therefore, electric vehicles are the only vehicle that hold the promise of being fully waterproof.

And some companies such as DNR, as shown here in the photo, and Rivian, are really pursuing that capability and really waterproofing their vehicles quite well. And then EVs can provide much load flexibility to help the grid be able to handle surges, in particular, and heat waves.

And so this was very useful in California last fall when a heat wave was causing a lot of people to run their air conditioners and it was going to overload the grid. So they sent out this text that you can see in the upper right-hand corner. And EVs, more so than anything, are responsive to signals such as this.

There's many signals for people to reduce their load I won't get into. But as you can see in the chart on the lower left-hand side or the lower right-hand side, EVs are the most flexible and a very large load to respond to signals such as this and help not overwhelm the grid during heat waves. Next slide, please.

However, EVs can also decrease resilience and add to vulnerabilities. In most locations, electric outages occur more often than petroleum outages. However, you have to keep in mind that gasoline pumps require electricity. So there are many, many times when electrical outages cut off the supply to gasoline because it's stored underground and needs to be pumped out.

Evacuation needs to be more carefully planned for EVs because they have shorter ranges and longer dwell times. And so I think Shmuel is going to be talking more about that later on. You need to coordinate the vehicles that are evacuating so they can charge the adequate amount and get on to higher ground and to emergency shelters.

Standing water can cause thermal runaway if EVs are not adequately waterproofed. We saw that during Hurricane Ian in just a few electric vehicles. The additional load from EVs could make the grid more fragile by bringing it up to capacity in certain circuits.

Cold weather reduces the range and charging speed, which makes the vehicles have more limitations. And more connectivity increases the risk of cyberattacks. Next slide, please. So what are some ways to maximize the EV resilience benefits and minimize the resilience vulnerabilities of EVs?

This is just a very high overview. You can locate the charging stations strategically around flood zones. And there are maps of these flood zones for everywhere in the U.S. that FEMA provides at this URL I have here. And that helps with both evacuation and recovery operations, just getting your EVSE in the right locations.

You need to have a plan for evacuation possibly with mobile charging stations, so that's the photo that I have on the right here, is that some evacuation plans, such as for the state of Florida, include mobile chargers where you can bring them into strategic locations to help EVs charge and evacuate.

And ensure that the control box meets the National Electric Code height requirements to avoid short circuits due to flooding. And you need to add backup, or you could bad add backup power to some key chargers. You can hook them up to PV battery or generators to help with evacuation and recovery operations.

You can install bidirectional chargers at essential facilities so EVs can come and power these facilities and these essential loads. And if power needs to be cut to an EVSE, you have a plan to bring it back online quickly, safely, and ideally remotely.

And then you can play sunshades over EVSE and parking spots in the summer to reduce air conditioning load and electricity use. NREL has done a few studies on this showing how much electricity you can actually save and how much you can add to the range of the EV if you park them in the shade instead of the sun, so you don't need to spend so much electricity with that initial cool off of the vehicle.

And then there are some communications protocols and standards that ensure safety in terms of cybersecurity that you need to make sure that you adhere to. And there are a few you can choose between, but we recommend these two that are listed here. So that's my very quick overview. And so I guess we are moving on and we're doing the general Q&A session after all the panelists, right?

Bridget Gilmore: We'll do a general Q&A after. So yeah, I'll stop sharing here. Thank you so much for that overview. Hopefully, it'll help couch all the presentations that are to come. So I'll stop sharing and then I'll pass it off to you, Shmuel, if you are able to start sharing your slides. Thank you so much for that though, Caley.

Caley Johnson: My pleasure.

Shmuel Bismuth, PG&E: My slides are visible and you can hear me OK?

Bridget Gilmore: Yeah, looks good. Thank you.

Shmuel Bismuth: I'm going to discuss briefly some of the work I did for the fleet electrification of PG&E. Excuse me. One second, I'm just trying to find my green screen. So I'm going to talk specifically about fleets and resiliency. I'll also touch a little bit on PG&E's efforts with mobile charging during evacuations due to preventative safety power shutoffs.

So there's just a general approach to, excuse me, to electrifying a fleet depot at PG&E. So it was important to gather the operating data of the fleet, including things like duty cycle, telematics data from the vehicles, utility rates, and demand structure.

These will differ by locations, by geography, opportunities for demand management, which can also double as resiliency solutions. So onsite storage can take care of that, figuring out the charging needs of the vehicle types by different classes and size and also based on duty cycle and telematics, selection of hardware, selection of software, which can manage things like charging time of use rates.

It’s important to project the fleet requirements based on regulatory, but also against available grants and other funding sources, so as to maximize funding for both vehicle procurement and EVSE or charger procurement.

It takes a little bit of extra planning also, but to try to figure out what the regulatory looks like for some type of planning horizon such that the infrastructure can be mapped out accordingly.

Another thing is trying to build out the underground infrastructure for a fleet of the future in a single or initial mobilization, so this means installing vacant, appropriately sized conduits for a future state. This allows for flexibility in future installations.

One example is two or three years ago, people were installing 50 kW chargers as a fast charger. Today, 350 kW is not out of question for installing a high-power charger. And so these larger vacant conduits give that type of flexibility.

It also makes sense to size this switchgear and distribution panels appropriately based on those anticipated loads. So installing charging for unexpected cases, this could mean short-term power outages overnight that interrupt charging cycles, short-term power outages at any time that interfere with EV charging, having fast chargers available on site.

There are some available that have built-in battery storage, there are some that can be just powered by the grid, ultra-fast charging that can make up for the lost time if a charging window is interrupted. So planning for that is appropriate.

I wanted to give this quick rule of thumb or a feel for what an electrified fleet would look like. Some of the larger fleets—some of the larger depots that require upwards of 8 megawatt hours of energy each night to power up the fleet based on telematics data and based on the planning horizon of the year 2030.

There are not real feasible solutions to make up that amount of energy requirement. But if needed, there are ways to provide this resiliency for different types of fleets, for different types of depots, and for different types of vehicles.

And so it's not always one solution fits all. There are different types of solutions for different types of fleets. But some of the research done here was to look for historical outage data at these different depots typically lasting larger than six hours, which would require the need for resiliency, but then also evaluating the fleet for different criticality of vehicles, different fleets might require might have different critical vehicles within them. And then determining the appropriate solution.

So it's not necessarily true that a large fleet would benefit from a large installation of batteries or a permanent installation of batteries. Sometimes a clean fuel generator, whether mobile or permanent, might provide a better solution because of the energy density and because of the overall energy required there.

So that covers the fleets. I left a little bit of examples of technology that's available today within specifications, and we can cover those more in the Q&A session. I just wanted to touch briefly on something PG&E did, a pilot PG&E ran in 2021 allowing for EV charging along evacuation corridors during PSPS events or in anticipation of wildfires in the 2021 season.

So PG&E identified locations along evacuation corridors. So evacuation corridors are typically state highways or county highways, major transportation arteries leaving areas that are considered high fire threat districts or high fire threat areas, and strategically placing mobile EV chargers at customer resource centers, which is something PG&E sets up for customers where people can charge their phones or get other types of resources that are no longer available to them because the power is out, and providing these mobile chargers for customers along these evacuation routes such that they can charge for roughly 15 miles or 10 minutes of charge to get them to a place where the grid is still up and active.

I want to stress a little bit the importance of grid resiliency itself. So separately, PG&E has had a very large effort in providing resiliency to the grid itself by sectionizing and by providing island microgrids and generators to smaller islands to keep power on for more people.
And this reduces the requirements to nil for the mobile fast charging pilot. There were procured mobile chargers available on standby, but they were not required to be deployed because of separate grid hardening efforts at PG&E. So I will leave it now to the next presenter and I'll be available for questions later.

Bridget Gilmore: Great. Thank you so much. We'll pass it to Diego.

Diego Lopez, Save Energy Coalition: All righty. I'll share my screen. All right, ready to go. Well, thank you all so much for joining us today. And thank you for the other presenters for setting up. Again, what does resiliency mean? And how do we look at EVSE resiliency development?
And I'll give you our background and how we really provide tools and resources for EVSE development, through the Save Energy Coalition. Formerly we used to be called Northern Colorado Clean Cities, but we have expanded. We are still hosting Northern Colorado Clean Cities, but we are looking more into both clean energy and clean transportation.

Some of the goals for my workshop here, again, is to maybe give you a background into what we have done, a little bit about what Colorado has done to plan for EVSE resiliency, some of the tools that our state Department of Transportation has developed, and then drilling down even further, what does the holistic Colorado Resiliency Framework look like?

And then we'll highlight some of our EVSE resiliency projects that Save Energy Coalition has reviewed in the past and managed in the past, and some of the factors and tools that helped us predict some of the EVSE development that was needed, some of the futureproofing that was needed, and a little bit about some of the advising sessions best practices that we have learned.

So again, a little bit of background on Save Energy Coalition, we're an independent nonprofit. We're sponsored by the Department of Energy, and the Colorado Energy Office, and several local community members. We help empower local governments, utilities, and schools to adopt clean energy and clean transportation through these types of educational resources, grant writing, and in particular technical analysis.

So I'm really glad that I saw a bunch of utilities and state governments online here. Hopefully, what we can learn from Colorado's planning really comes first from their NEVI plan and from their Colorado EV plan.

If you're diving deep into our Colorado National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure plan, we are planning to receive around $57 million over the course of five years. And we are looking at specific characteristics for EVSE placement. And we'll show you a little bit, in a bit, what those characteristics are.

And in addition to that, I'll show you some of the qualifications, some of the ideas coming from our 2023 Colorado EV plan also overseeing a lot of what utilities can do to support electrification. Some of the ideas from that NEVI plan, from our plans, again, first come from CDOT.

And I think the first resiliency framework that we have used that comes from CDOT is there for our framework for evaluating resiliency. So their characteristics are looking at the robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity of a system. So looking at any charging station asset, any type of transportation project.

We'll go through first these four characteristics to ensure that we're thinking of flooding, we're thinking of snow removal, we're thinking of fires, and we're, again, thinking of redundancy systems. Additionally, CDOT has created, and we have felt that we have needed, a mapping tool. Another great tool from CDOT overlays resiliency risks, fire risks, with the current charging station map.

And so we can really see what are our gaps, what specific charging stations need to be incorporated. And here what we’ve typically seen from FHWA is that we need to look at charging stations every 50 miles. But for redundancy and for resiliency, we’re typically now seeing, in particular for rural communities, every 30 miles for a fast charger.

Another thing that we’re seeing is that the transportation system as a whole should be dependent on some distributed energy systems, making it less vulnerable to electric disruptions. So again, we're talking about solar and backup battery. I saw in the chat maybe even green or blue hydrogen.

So electrification or distributed energy systems can come in many forms. And that really leads to vehicle grid integration and how we think about providing backup power. When we're thinking of it, we, again, can think of backup batteries for residential energy projects needing anywhere from 18 to 28 kilowatts per day to manage a typical home, a single-family home.

But again, as it was mentioned for a fleet, you're typically maybe needing 60 kilowatts or 200 kilowatts per vehicle to ensure that you have backup power. So really, again, that leads into the Colorado Resiliency Framework as a whole. It's not just so much how quickly the electric charging station can come back online, but how quickly these other assets can come back online.

So if those vehicles that we're talking about are an electric school bus or we're looking at first responders, how does the infrastructure support, again, these other factors like health and social, like our housing and watersheds?

So again, we're really looking and focusing on redundancy to develop that contingency plan and maybe even looking into training technicians, first responders, or other staff about the usage of electric vehicles, about the backup batteries, and the amount of capacity that should be stated for a given use.

And I'm trying to keep it as high level as possible because each project is so different. Our projects are all different. From Julesburg, Colorado we worked with FreeWire, which is a standalone charging station. And it has a backup battery worth of 36 kilowatts.

So when you're really thinking of it, again, that's maybe great for two to three vehicles, first responders in the area, in Julesburg, that need to respond to fire mitigation. We're also looking at Sandbox Solar and working with other solar companies to speak about EV charging station deployment and the resiliency that are needed in Fort Collins, Frederick, Colorado, and Westminster.

We each had solar batteries and EV charging stations all working together for resiliency. All of them are going to be acting as hubs for their specific communities. 28 kilowatts is not a large amount. But definitely in Stapp Toyota in Frederick, or with Namaste Solar working in Westminster, with 1.7 megawatts, we're really looking at a large amount of capacity.

In Westminster, we saw that there's the capacity for 49 Level Two electric vehicle charging stations for that 1.7-megawatt capacity. And so again, that maybe goes down into some of the last-minute factors that can help us predict EVSE resiliency.

It's the location of distributed energy resources and the EV charging station units every 10 feet to develop Level Two or Level Three charging stations. Looking at the climate in the area, especially if it drops to negative 20 degrees, we're wanting to see a canopy or garage as that lowers the capacity for the charging station.

We're looking at the types and the sizes of EVs and the expected demand of EV charging. And then that impacts the availability of the grid power, solar, and battery capacity. And what we're typically wanting to see is a redundancy in interconnectivity of around 30% in additional energy capacity for your average demand.

Last, things that we use also that are equally weighted as criteria for fleets is the average annual daily traffic in the area, AASHTO's Roadway Classification, the freight value per ton, tourism dollars generated, the Social Vulnerability Index, and then again, the system redundancy.

Once we look at all of that fleet input, we're able to then gauge through our advising sessions which buildings are going to be the most resilient, the most cost-effective, and over the course of three to five years, how many charging stations we’ll need. We'll pass out a school district fleet audit report for everybody's review. And let me know if you have any questions. Thank you so much.

Bridget Gilmore: Great. Thank you so much for that presentation. We'll now pass it to Mandeep.

Mandeep Guragain, EVgo: Just one minute here I get this. Hey. First of all, thank you, Brigitte and everyone, for having me participate here and being able to share the futureproofing of electric charging stations

So before I go there, I just wanted to give a brief intro to EVgo. In general, we have over 850 stations currently operational in 60-plus cities and across 30 states. We're very committed to 98% network uptime. And there's a lot of work on reliability of the station itself and a lot of work within the company.
A point to note is we do have 100% renewables through energy credits. So we promote green energy development to support our charging infrastructure. We have 140 million people within 10 miles of an EVgo station, and that's going to only increase with NEVI and similar infrastructure programs within the country. And half a million EV drivers are using EVgo stations. And we support all charging standards, including Tesla.

I also wanted to briefly touch base on the Connect the Watts initiative that we've been doing for over a year and a half, where this program is to bring every entity—not only the charging companies, but the government, equipment manufacturers, utilities, sidte hosts where we are locating these charging stations, and automakers and contractors—to just work on various challenges within the charging infrastructure and then tackle that.

And we've made a lot of progress through that process. And this program started to help with the overall, how quickly we can build this infrastructure and help with the range anxiety that is there right now, which is one of the limiting factors for the adoption of the EV in general.

So these stations need to get installed quicker than a very traditional commercial installation. So there's a lot of work just in general, and the Connect The Watts is helping driving those for us and the company. From the futureproofing perspective, I know Shmuel slightly touched on the underground infrastructure.
So there has been an evolution of EV in general. For the fast chargers it started with 50 kilowatts a couple of years ago and now most of our installations are 350-kilowatt DC stations. And that number is even increasing in terms of how many charging stations we provide at a site.

So that number of minimum charging stations is also increasing. What that means is, overall, the demand for the power and the utilities is only increasing. One of the things that we do is that we futureproof for what we anticipate is needed for those projects and there are various ways and considerations that need to be discussed for that process.

Yes, we need to upsize the conduits or equipment pads so that you can support an increasing demand or increasing charging infrastructure. Products that's being available as the efficiency goes up. And then also there's a switchboard that needs to be worked, which also entails—there's a need for additional real estate at a site.

And that has always been one of the big challenges just for the EV deployment, is the need for the real estate on an already existing charging, sorry, charging stations. So that education is an important piece. And then we continue like—that needs to be discussed with the utility, that needs to be discussed with the site host where those stations are being put.

And also, we are looking at charging for all, so there's a lot of ADA considerations. And as the number of stations increases, what's the right number of ADA stations we want to have on a site? Those are some of the other considerations on futureproofing that we do.

Utility point of connection, POC, and constraints like that, in general, when we go and look at these sites and/or plan and perform due diligence, this is one of the big, or one of the main, items on really assessing the feasibility of a site. Because we want to have stations built in locations where we could build in the next year or not like that requires—I mean, yes, we can plan for grid hardening and stuff like that, but we do want sites where we can go, and build, and make this available to our customers, and just help with the overall construction of these projects.

And sometimes when we do futureproofing, we have to really work closely with the utilities to ensure that, OK, as our network planning suggests, or there's a lot of considerations on network planning which looks at the demography, how much we're expecting to have these charging electric vehicle adopted in coming years, and lays out the NEVI funding and all that stuff into the network plan.

And based on that it determines for us how many charging stations we expect to build now, and then how much we want to futureproof for the future growth perspective. So all those studies are a very important part of future planning.

And what that does just on the site sometimes is you may have a capacity on certain location at the time, but as you grow or as we increase the stations, that location might change, or it might need an upgrade. And so those are some of the challenges that we continuously work on with the utility.

And also work together, I mean, that's one thing: As a charging infrastructure provider, what we do is we share our network plan, we share—really that's a day-to-day conversation we have with the utilities and really prep them on this is what we expect to have on those sites so that we can really plan ahead on what to expect from the point of connection. It shouldn't change when we increase or when we upsize our stations and all that consideration. So that planning becomes a very strategic work that we've been doing with various utilities.

And then the other thing that we need to work very closely is also with the site host, because it is taking longer in a larger area. And depending on the demand, we have to explain them and just have them on board on how many stations or how many parking spaces we need to deploy this infrastructure.
So education, it is a very important piece of this deployment as well. That's what I have for now. I mean, I'm sure there's going to be questions I'll be discussing on the Q&A. Thank you.

Bridget Gilmore: Great. Thank you so much. All the speakers, if you want to come on video, that would be great. I know that there have been lots of great questions that have come in through the Q&A so far. I was hoping to start off with a couple of questions that have come in for Shmuel. So the first one, "You mentioned a 5% rule for installation of the charging infrastructure, could you talk a little bit more about what that 5% rule entails?"

Shmuel Bismuth: I meant to put that in quotations. It's not a hard and fast rule, but it's a more strategic approach to the ratio between DC charging and AC charging, or fast charger versus standard Level Two chargers. So one thing to note is Level Two chargers are no longer necessarily a 6 kW charger. There are many on the market that are available at either 6 kW on a single-phase system. But then some ratio between those and a DC charger [AUDIO OUT].

Take for example, if you're at a supermarket and you're installing chargers in the parking structure for the supermarket or the parking lot, you may elect to put 10 Level Two chargers and then one, and you anticipate a dwell time of half an hour to an hour for customers, but then you also offer the opportunity for people to just come by and quick charge if they're running low. So it's not a hard and fast rule.

Bridget Gilmore: Got it. So it's a ratio between the Level Two solar charging and the faster DC fast charging for customers, but not a hard and fast rule, but thinking about the difference in the needs of the customer at the specific site? Does that seem fair?

Shmuel Bismuth: Yeah.

Bridget Gilmore: I know I was going in and out a little bit, but—

Shmuel Bismuth: Sorry, I don't know it looks like my video was stopped by the host or something.

Bridget Gilmore: I think the connection was coming in and out, but we were able to hear your response. And there's another question regarding the pilot project that you all had done for the evacuation corridor resilience pilot. Folks were wondering what the outcome was of that pilot project. Were there any mobile chargers that were deployed? Will it be rerun and assessed when there are different evacuations that might occur?

Shmuel Bismuth: Yes, the chargers were all on standby. They were not required to be deployed because grid hardening measures minimize the impact to customers from proactive outages. I'll have to double check if the pilot would be rerun, but grid hardening has taken a front seat. And so grid hardening eliminates the need for these types of resiliency solutions.

But there have been other types of resiliency solutions in terms of not just for EVs, but for entire downtown areas of small towns in high fire threat districts using things called pre-installed interconnection hubs, where you island certain portions of the grid and then back them up with some type of clean fuel generation. And so those lessons can be applied toward fleet depots or they can be applied toward installations along highway corridors, even not under emergency.

Bridget Gilmore: Yeah. And while I have you, sorry, there were three questions that were interrelated. There was a follow-up question on the grid hardening that you had just mentioned. Someone is wondering, "Are there options other than back-ties? Is there underground options that you all are thinking of or overhead designed for higher wind speeds?" And this person is wondering about thinking of the California context and also a national context maybe if you know of things happening outside of California.

Shmuel Bismuth: I won't speak for outside of California, but there are several different approaches. PG&E has committed to underground 10,000 miles of line. We've made significant progress on that so far or actually a pilot has made some impact or inroads on the undergrounding efforts.

Also installing different types of poles, so composite poles, larger poles, covered wire, enhanced settings on protection. All of those things fall into hardening. So yeah, those, and then the pre-installed interconnection hub.

So islanding certain portions of the grid and providing pre-installed interconnection points such that generation can roll to set locations and then switching plans in the control centers such that these things can happen, if not automatically, then very rapidly, without any additional engineering work. So it's not just having back-ties, there are several other options.

Bridget Gilmore: Thank you for that additional detail. I was hoping to ask Diego a question. I thought it was really great to see the specific projects and the tools that you had highlighted. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit more on how that resiliency map was developed and how other stakeholders might consider making a similar type of map for their specific locations. Some folks were wondering on the cost in the timeline of putting together that type of planning process.

Diego Lopez: Yeah. So I would look at, and I can send it in, this risk and resilience analysis procedure. It's a manual for calculating risk that CDOT uses. It's looking at flooding, rockfall, snow, fire debris. So that's maybe the first thing, the first assets that we look at to overlay for the map.

But we also have the other maps for our charging stations and where are gaps within NEVI. And so through GIS we're able to overlay both of those. And then in specific regions we also want to look towards the utility to see what types of assets they have. What is the cost of electricity? What is the demand rate?

Someone also asked about, how do you progressively reduce the cost for the consumer for EV charging? And so that, again, maybe answers that question as well, is that you're needing both the local government, state government, and utility to support.

Going into the future, the utility might also need to look at improving assets, improving transmission to lower the costs and increase the resiliency of a specific project, but then maybe can use that specific project as a distributed energy resource going into the future.

Bridget Gilmore: OK, great. Thank you. This is a good question, I think, for the whole group. So this person is asking, "What about the resilience against temporary grid issues—for instance, things that might just happen for a couple of minutes, or power interruptions, or communication interruptions that might happen during maybe a weather event? In your experience, can current infrastructure and charging infrastructure specifically handle these scenarios smoothly and automatically in a timely manner?"

So I don't know Caley, if that's a good one for you, or Mandeep, if you want to speak to how EVgo has handled these types of communication or weather challenges.

Mandeep Guragain: I mean, I can briefly talk about it. So basically, I mean, there's a lot of software knowing what the fault is. So there's a lot of—the product itself is getting smarter and smarter in what type of fault we're seeing in our system and that communicates to quickly respond to it.

So that's just—identifying and responding to any issues is just getting better every day, I can say that, including things like brownouts or loss of utility and that kind of stuff. Because one of the big things for us is to identify what the issue is on-site when it goes offline.

And getting that information, knowing that this is why, it just helps us connect with the utilities or anyone quicker. So that, in general, is improving. I can say that that. And the other aspect is just the, I think, just the BES, and all that other is going to play for these shorter things, these interruptions. It just—I think it has to work well with the economics and all the other factors that’s required to deploy those products.

Bridget Gilmore: Good. Is there anything else that anyone wants to add on that question?

Shmuel Bismuth: Yeah. On this duration of one hour on a charge window of six hours, a significant state there at the end of that as long as the rated ones comes back on. There's only a few of them are charging window. The charge session typically will stop in the event of a power outage. But as long as the session gets started back up once the power comes on, the vehicle itself is an energy storage device. And so as long as some portion of that is [AUDIO OUT].

Bridget Gilmore: OK, great. I think it was cutting in and out a little.

Shmuel Bismuth: As long as some portions of that [AUDIO OUT]

Bridget Gilmore: It's cutting in and out a little bit, but from what I heard, it's an electric vehicle, it is an energy storage device. And when the power goes out for a duration of time the power session will end, but then it will continue back up again. I don't know if other folks had heard anything else, but that was what I caught from that. Thank you for that question.

Let's see. If someone is wondering about how the costs for charging sessions are determined, I know that this has been something that's been discussed and I know Diego showed a nice graphic of the different costs for the different portions of the hour depending on the utility. I was wondering if folks could speak to that. Diego, if you’re—

Diego Lopez: I'm wondering if I can share my screen really quickly and actually show that we have a tool, open-source, for people to use to determine your amount of kilowatts needed. We really just need the vehicle information. So how many vehicles? What's the capacity? How many miles do you drive a day?

We also look at how many hours are needed to charge. We're looking at how many hours in a day depending on how your utility have demand rates. And so if we are given your vehicle information, your general fleet usage, and then also your utility data, we are able to give you a pretty good sample in terms of which buildings can cost how much.

And really we have actually seen, if you remove your demand rate and get rid of and utilize batteries, for this example, you can lower your yearly costs by $6,000 or as much as 50% when you're, again, removing yourself from those demand rates. So we can share these tools if needed.

Bridget Gilmore: Great.

Caley Johnson: And likewise, oh, yeah. And NREL also has a tool called EVI-FAST, stands for Financial Analysis Scenario Tool, that's available online where you can play around with the different cost structures for charging different amounts per kilowatt hours and per minute or hour parked there. I'll post that in the Q&A as well.

Bridget Gilmore: Great. Thank you. Great resources. This is a good question. I don't know. Is there any publicly accessible survey data on the usage time rates of the general public—for instance, when folks are needing a full charge versus a half charge? Maybe for EVgo, how you all think about what kind of chargers are needed where?

Mandeep Guragain: That's a very good question. I mean, this is where we look into the network planning that I mentioned earlier. So we have a pretty extensive team that just does this planning around what is really needed on a site, how many chargers we expect now, how many chargers we need in the future, based on various data that overlays on that.

So, I don't think I can go into more details on that, but there are internally developed tools and maybe not right now, but I'm sure there's going to be publicly available tools. And then the other probably a good platform to look at is PlugShare, which is where a lot of drivers, it gives a trend of like what's happening now. It's just, I think, what's happening in the future. It's a very good projection that can be done through some of those analyses.

Bridget Gilmore: Great. Well, thank you all so much. Realizing we're already at the top of the hour, I want to thank everyone for participating today, for coming to our webinar during the busy summertime. And thank you so much to the panelists for sharing their wealth of expertise and willingness to answer all these great questions that have come in.

Mandeep Guragain: Thank you so much.

Bridget Gilmore: Thank you.

Caley Johnson: Bye, everyone.

Bridget Gilmore: Have a good rest of your day.

Caley Johnson: You too.