Webinar: Curbside EV Charging Strategies (Text Version)

This is a text version of Webinar: Curbside EV Charging Strategies, presented on Feb. 27, 2024.

Curbside EV Charging Strategies Webinar Transcript 2.27.24

Debs Schrimmer, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Hi, everyone. This is Debs Schrimmer from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Welcome to our webinar today, Curbside EV Charging Strategies. I see that folks are trickling in. And I'm going to wait another moment while some more folks come in. But we're super excited to have you today. Thanks for being here. I feel like we should get some theme music for the Joint Office, some music while folks trickle in.

Gabe Klein, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Oh, yeah. Yeah, actually, right before this, somebody sent me an Instagram reel, and it was– did somebody just win the Stanley Cup? What's going on? Because it was like a Stanley Cup video, but it was all people in New Orleans dancing to bounce music. And I was like– I totally need that. I need more bounce music in my life from New Orleans. So maybe that's what we should do. We should start off with some upbeat hip-hop.

Debs Schrimmer: I think that's great.

Gabe Klein: Big Freedia. (A comment from the chat) Yes.

Debs Schrimmer: It's a throwback to your DJ days. Maybe you could DJ the opening of these webinars. That'd be fun.

Gabe Klein: I could do that. By the way, one of the best shows I saw when I was in Chicago was Big Freedia. Amazing show. Great live. Also, Kool Keith, for those of you that like hip-hop, that was a great show in Chicago.

Debs Schrimmer: This is actually a dual webinar today. It's a hip-hop and curbside charging webinar. So, you're all in for a treat.

Gabe Klein: Gotta keep it real, Debs.

Debs Schrimmer: Absolutely.

Gabe Klein: That's what the kids want these days.

Debs Schrimmer: Well, with that, we'll keep it real with some Zoom tips and housekeeping. Just want to make sure folks know that if you'd like to submit a question, you can use the Q&A window to do that. And just want to remind folks that this webinar is being recorded.

Gabe Klein: This webinar is lit. And look, we haven't even started yet.

Debs Schrimmer: Yep. So, great, here's the agenda for today. We're going to have some brief opening remarks from myself and our executive director, Gabe Klein. Then we're going to move into the presentations from a truly fantastic group of panelists. I'm really grateful for them being here today to share their expertise and wisdom with you all. This is a really hot topic. And we have a lot to learn from them.

And then we'll move into a panel discussion. And then we want to answer your questions. So again, feel free to submit questions in the Q&A button, and we'll try to get as many of those answered as we can.

So just a quick overview again of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. We are really excited about our mandate to help support the Biden-Harris administration's ambitious goal to decarbonize the transportation network and help support the rollout of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030. And to do that, we have a vision of creating a future where everyone can ride and drive electric.

And making that possible requires a lot of coordination with different departments, including the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, and the EPA.

And we help support a variety of funding programs across the federal government to support electrification, whether that's helping build the national EV charging network along corridors through the NEVI program, supporting EV charging at the community level with the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure program, as well as supporting the Federal Transit Administration's low and no-emission program for electric bus deployments and working with the EPA on the rollout of their clean school bus program.

Another big part of the Joint Office is providing technical assistance. And we do this with a lot of different stakeholders, whether that's state departments of transportation, tribal nations, transit agencies, school districts, and communities at the local level. We are here to help, whether that's through providing specific subject matter expertise and analysis. We have a really great and deep bench of subject matter experts across the energy and transportation disciplines. And we'd love for you to reach out. We've got a website link at the bottom. And we'd love to hear from you.

We also produce a lot of really great resources on a bunch of different topics. We have tool kits. We have deep-dive reports on analysis. And then we have really actionable help sheets and checklists to assist you wherever you are on your electrification journey. And those are all posted online.

In particular, I'd love to give a shout out to the team that just published a really great white paper yesterday. It's called "Community Charging, Emerging Multifamily, Curbside, and Multimodal Practices."

And this is fresh off the press and really covers a lot of exciting topics around how to bring community charging to you, thinking about really specific use cases around supporting individuals who may be renters and live in multifamily housing and don't have access to home charging for overnight charging, thinking about curbside charging and a lot of the considerations of the public right away.

And then making sure that this is a really holistic and multimodal charging network that supports not just privately owned vehicles but shared mobility options, micromobility, and connections with transit. So please check that out. It's on our website, and we'd love to hear what you think about it.

And then finally, we want to hear from you. We are here to help. And you can reach us on our website under the Contact button. So just to get a sense of who is in the room, we've got a couple of polling questions.

So, question one, what region of the country are you from? It looks like it's lighting up very rapidly. And it looks like the Northeast has the most representation today followed behind by the Southeast.

Awesome. I think we might have another question. All right, and what sector are folks from today?

Looks like local regional government is maybe taking the lead right now, though closely followed with state government. It's also great to see folks from the nongovernment public sector and some of our friends from utilities. Really great to have you here. You are a big part of the puzzle of making this all work.

All right, and with that, I am very excited to introduce our executive director, Gabe Klein. Thanks for being here today, Gabe.

Gabe Klein: Absolutely. Thank you, Debs. I just promised somebody via text that I would not say "lit" anymore on the webinar. I'm just kidding. No, it's great to be here. I have been so excited about this particular webinar for so long since it's my passion, curbside. And there's so much that we can do, so much more that we can do. We're just getting started.

This whole expedition that we're on to electrify everything, it takes a while. It takes a minute. And I was just talking to somebody about the headlines. We've been doing this for a couple of years; we don't have that many chargers. Well, you have to walk a little bit before you can run. And curbside is a great example of where there's a bunch of planning that's got to take place if you want it to be truly multimodal, if you want to light up the whole curb not just one space.

And we know that a lot of people are doing– a lot of people on this call are doing that, whether they're in the public sector or in the private sector working with the public sector. And so first of all, thanks, Debs, for moderating this great webinar. We have awesome speakers, which I'll talk about in just a minute.

But we're going to talk about best practices. We're going to talk about challenges, strategies for effective planning for overcoming these challenges for deployment, ultimately. And then, of course, there's actually operating curbside electric vehicle charging projects.

And I think the thing I really want to emphasize is that you'll hear out of the administration, even out of our office often, so much about DC fast charging. Really important, we have a hundred and almost 73 thousand fast chargers as of today. We've got like 116,000 gas stations, to put it in perspective. So we're making a lot of progress.

But the majority, 85%-plus of your charging needs, across– that's on average across different community types– will be met by low-power charging. And those are facts and figures from our partners at NREL. And within that, curbside charging is going to be really important to figure out in cities. And we've got federal funding now to support– whether it's the planning or the deployment of this charging.

So whether it's CFI grants, there's another round coming soon, whether it's our own FOAs, we had one that we just awarded, we're working on another, there's lots of funding out there. There's no shortage.

And also, I'll just give a preview. We're working on a document we'll be putting out about business modeling around charging and how to be most effective in deploying chargers thinking about the long-term sustainability. So that'll be coming soon. We'll have webinars on that and so on and so forth.

But today, we're really excited to hear from our partner on the white paper that just went out. And again, props to Debs and Alexander and the whole team over at Volpe. Alex is a PhD, Volpe National Transportation Systems Center. He's going to cover our newly published white paper that's now available on either rideelectric.gov or driveelectric.gov, depending on how you get around.

Oliver Sellers-Garcia, who's awesome, he's the Green New Deal director at the City of Boston, discussing how Boston is looking to fund additional curbside charging opportunities.

And then an old friend of mine and maybe yours, Shannon Dulaney, director of public affairs at It's Electric, who will discuss the company's innovative approach to EV charging by leveraging a behind-the-meter connection using a bring your own cord model. This is something I'm particularly excited about. We see this already in Europe. And we can't wait to learn how we might be able to scale this technology in the US, another tool in the toolbox for transportation electrification. And I believe an awardee in our latest FOA.

So really excited for today's discussion. Thank you all for being here and to our presenters for sharing their time and their expertise. Back to you, Debs.

Debs Schrimmer: Thanks, Gabe. All right, so we are going to move into the panel portion. First, we'll be hearing from Alex Epstein at Volpe. Dr. Epstein leads a portfolio of transportation, sustainability, and vulnerable road user safety initiatives, spanning local state, federal opportunity– federal transportation agencies, excuse me. Currently, Dr. Epstein is partnering with the Joint Office to produce electric mobility charging infrastructure resources for rural, urban, and multifamily housing in the US and is a lead author on the white paper that we mentioned came out yesterday.

Next, we'll hear from Oliver Sellars-Garcia, who serves as Boston's first-ever Green New Deal director and is a cabinet-level senior advisor to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. In this role, Oliver works across the city to advance climate action through strategies that address social, racial, and economic inequality.

And then we'll hear from Shannon Dulaney, who is an urbanist with a decade-long commitment to sustainable transportation and currently serves as the director of public affairs. Previously to joining It's Electric, she led the community partnerships team at Spin, a shared micromobility company, and worked as a federal lobbyist for Honda. Shannon holds dual master's from the Yale School of Management and the Yale School of the Environment. So thank you so much for being here today. And we will now get started with Alex.

Alexander Epstein, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Thank you so much, Debs. And thank you so much, Gabe. I'll jump right in. And next time, I'll submit a higher resolution photo. Pleased to share with you today a flavor of the "Community E-mobility Charging" white paper that was just referred to that was published yesterday. We're excited to share again a slice of this on emerging multifamily, curbside, and multimodal solutions for e-mobility charging for all Americans.

Next slide. The goal here is that many of you and hundreds– over 600 registrations, as I understand, for this webinar will be motivated to go out and check this new resource, dig in, share feedback, and find it useful in expanding e-mobility charging to a wider cross-section of urban and rural America.

In particular, this white paper brings together a lot of evolving practices and technologies for residents of multifamily housing and for those who rely on either curbside charging or those who do not drive privately owned vehicles. So that electrification can benefit everyone. As I'll walk us through briefly here in the white paper, we were able to describe a variety of charging solutions based on the topology of how vehicles are stored, how electric vehicles are stored, what are some common technical solutions to barriers for electrifying, including smart outlets and panels and so on.

And then we dig into four different case studies and example projects, both from the US and across the world, again, hoping this becomes a resource for public officials, for property owners, vehicle owners, operators, and utilities. Next slide.

All right, key motivations here. It's important to observe before we dive in– and as Gabe mentioned, there's a great deal of attention on DC fast charging, on corner charging, which is a piece of the puzzle. But it's important to take a step back and recognize that about one third of US households live in multifamily buildings. About 2/3 of rental households live in multifamily buildings. And only about 5% of home charging takes place in that kind of housing.

So clearly there's a barrier, there's a disconnect and an opportunity to address that segment, that one third of the population. It's also important to recognize that about a third of Americans don't drive, whether they're under the driving or over the driving or they just don't have driver's licenses. This is also very important to recognize. So, we take on the next slide, an expansive approach to considering what e-mobility charging means.

So next slide. And with this context, we frame this white paper as a resource to develop e-mobility charging solutions that support these three categories, again, a very significant fraction of the US population.

And we also take, in terms of terminology, just to be clear, when we're talking about electric mobility, we're thinking not just about four-wheelers, about electric vehicles like pictured here, but indeed electric micromobility devices, e-bikes, e-scooters, as well as electric transit that allow everyone to not only drive electric but ride electric so that the right tool for each trip is possible for residents in multifamily housing and urban areas and beyond. Next slide.

So, in terms of some of the barriers that face especially multifamily residents from accessing charging, these include higher capital costs for installing and in more complex scenarios than a detached exclusionary zone single family house, as would be the simplest case. There can be grid challenges, longer installation timelines. There can be dependence on property owners and split responsibility. There can be interactions with permitting and parking policies in terms of curbside charging and competing uses for the curb that we can dive into a bit later.

But there are evolving technology and policy solutions that can help overcome some of these challenges, as we start on the next slide, to provide a little bit of a flavor here. As I mentioned, one thing that we did in this white paper that we hope is going to be helpful is considering how different charging technologies can be most relevant depending on how private vehicles are stored. Is there on-site parking to store vehicles, yes or no?

And if at a multifamily housing development, an apartment building, condominium complex, if there are spaces, they could be assigned or they could be not assigned. And each of these scenarios starts to have different implications. If that parking is not on site, then there's public parking to store these vehicles. And that could be curbside, as has been mentioned. And that is the title here of the webinar. Or it could be reliant on garages or lots or, indeed, dedicated charging hubs that are more like the gas station model.

Next slide. For each of these parking types, we've identified subtypes, the most aligned charging levels and approaches for implementing charging in these different scenarios as well as example projects that can help illustrate how these types of parking scenarios can be electrified so that there is access to charging infrastructure for residents of multifamily housing. Next slide.

We also go in this white paper into a number of emerging strategies that have promise in our view for ameliorating some of the challenges as well and opening up e-mobility charging to a wide range of residents in cities. So these include new payment methods. These include ways of taking dumb outlets and adding smarts to them to monetize and vendorize them.

They include the addition of batteries and energy storage to buffer energy demand. They include containerized or mobile charging. They include electrifying existing assets, rather than adding new assets to our street. Bring your own cord, supplying the cord instead of having the user supply the cord. And that's something I'm excited to hear one of the other speakers focus on later. As well as peer-to-peer charging and mobility hubs, which are pictured here at the bottom right.

And that again takes that broader perspective of what can be the right electric tool for each type of trip if different modes of electric transportation can be co-located and supplied electricity in a coordinated, planned way. So next slide.

Those are all largely technological solutions or strategies or practices. Let's not forget, and we cover this as well in this white paper, although we are largely focusing on the technical aspects, but there is an important policy aspect as well. And there are cities that are leading the way, there are jurisdictions that are leading the way in terms of adding EV provisions to building codes, ordinances, and zoning, as well as other permitting frameworks. These are just some examples. Next slide.

In terms of synthesizing these, the white paper provides four case studies that we developed that we hope will help illustrate and provide jumping off points for seeing how multifamily and multimodal charging, curbside charging, as well as e-bike and other types of micromobility charging can be implemented. And these are the four here. So we're just going to provide a very quick preview. But the paper goes into these in more depth.

One of these that encompassed really checking multiple boxes here is a partnership between the city and county of Denver and a nonprofit called Colorado Carshare that we were able to profile in terms of providing electric car share curbside to multifamily residents, including in public housing, and doing so on a relatively quickly implementation timeline and using some fairly innovative collaborations with some of the users.

Next slide. We profiled two different curbside implementations, one on each coast, two large city implementations. The LA Bureau street lighting is one of the largest in the US, with over 600 locations at this point across Los Angeles. This is really quite interesting in that similar to some of what we're seeing in Europe, they're taking advantage of existing street furniture rather than adding new street furniture, thus reducing cost and timeline potential.

There have been some challenges with vandalism, competition with cell towers. Lots of opportunities to learn and to develop solutions there. And, again, an exciting example of how curbside charging can be implemented at scale here.

So on the East Coast, next slide, we profiled New York City's program with about 100 charging ports, 35 locations, seeing very high utilization at those stations located around the five boroughs.

And in their case, lower vandalism but also challenges with parking enforcement and blockage and also just the general context of how do these relatively high-capital expense, permanent assets figure into larger plans of what that curb use is desired to be in the future, bike lanes, transit networks, et cetera?

International examples are the next and fourth of the case studies that we looked at. And we wanted to take a broader perspective given that Europe is some years ahead of us in terms of rolling out a highly multimodal approach to charging and a more urban-focused approach to charging that takes communities as the center of their investment.

And so, we profile, for example, Ubitricity is the largest public charging network in the UK. And we look at a variety of innovative solutions that are low-profile that minimally impact the pedestrian realm, for example. You can see that the curbstone charging in Cologne and that even provide charging in the absence of fixed infrastructure, like you can see there in Amsterdam at right. So, all of these are in the white paper and provide inspiring and hopefully actionable examples of how this can also be brought to the US context.

Those are our contact information. Thank you, Debs, for leading us off here. And it's been a pleasure leading the Volpe team on this project. Looking forward to the other two speakers.

Oliver Sellers-Garcia, City of Boston: Great. OK. Let's see. OK, so there are my slides. So thank you for having me here today. I'm Oliver Sellers-Garcia, the Green New Deal director in the mayor's office. And I'm just so delighted to be here with our federal partners and industry partners.

If we move to the next slide, I'm going to change the conversation just for a second to do a little bit of grounding about how we're approaching things in Boston. Obviously, my title is the Green New Deal director, but I am by far the only person working on the Green New Deal. In fact, the whole point is that I sit in the mayor's office to help agencies across the city and our partners really advance the climate agenda but in a manner that's different than how Boston has been doing it in the past.

And it's really focusing on the intersection of climate livability and justice. And what I would say is that– an oversimplified takeaway from this is that we're really not just chasing climate emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, we're really looking, with our limited resources and time, to make investments that also really do a lot to change who's been at the front of the line receiving public investment and also what it does for our city in terms of jobs and health.

And so I hope you see some of that come through in some of the choices that I'm going to talk about in the next couple of minutes. And if you don't, ask me some questions, and I will be happy to highlight some of that. So moving on to the next slide, we– I'm going to talk about a narrow component of what we're doing on climate, transportation, transportation electrification. This is like a little part of it.

But we have lots of tools in the toolbox for trying to catalyze the transition from ice to electric vehicles. And one of the things we're really looking to do is move to try some new things, including curbside charging, which is why we're here.

So we've got some demonstration projects going on that are– they've been a long time coming and will start appearing in the ground this spring and summer, which I'm really excited about. We had some pretty clear goals here to– as the other speakers have mentioned, it's not just the kind of charging that we see that gets more attention, like corridor or at-home charging that is our central need here in Boston.

We're trying to show how this is going to work in a dense urban environment with many constraints and that will do everything possible to catalyze transportation electrification, all in the service of remaining and enhancing being a transit, walking, and cycling-oriented city. We really want to do this by looking at how we expand access, particularly in environmental justice communities. But I want to put a flag here that we're not just talking about where stations are located but all the other benefits that come from transportation electrification.

Also, one thing that I've noticed is that we're– in the public sector, we're a little bit unsure of what's happening in this incredibly rapidly changing landscape. And that can be what– the prudent takeaway could be to just wait and see how things shake out. And we're trying to take a different approach to see, well, what business models are out there? We might be a little scared of not understanding what's going to work but try to find out what are some different ways to do it.

And so we have a– I'll go into this in a minute– but testing with a few different approaches and genuinely seeing how those work to make future decisions about scaling up. Also, of course, it's really important in our first steps to identify the pain points. And those come from permitting and construction, from utility coordination, from the procurement process. Getting a big city bureaucracy to do something new can be really painful the first time.

But then once we work things out, as a city government person, I believe we have almost limitless ability to act once we've built the machine to do that. And then also the obvious reason to do this is that we have numbers, and we see that there is enormous and growing market demand, from our residents and drivers and riders in Boston.

So moving to the next slide, let me tell you a little about specifically our curbside charging demonstration pilot project. So we chose to make this like even more of an experiment than what a pilot project normally is and say, we're not sure whether privately owned or publicly owned is the right choice.

That's the sort of choice that I mentioned earlier holds some local government folks back. I wonder if any of you in local government on the call here have had those same internal meetings, saying, like, which one should we do? Maybe we'll just put it off. So we thought, well, let's just test both and see how this works. Let's not force ourselves to choose something without the actual data to make a decision.

So we released two RFPs, and we'll be sort of finalizing contracts very soon and making a bigger announcement, although I'll mention a couple things today. And with our public/private partnership model, we're really interested in understanding whether the market– how and to what extent the market is going to serve environmental justice communities if we're not putting any financial resources other than licensing our public right of way.

How much can we actually do with a no cost to the city contract? What are the business models that are going to be successful in making this work at no cost to the city and our taxpayers? And I'm talking about not use of the equipment but just the installation and maintenance. And also, what are the trade-offs between being able to control something but owning and being responsible financially?

So in our public model, we are responsible for ownership and maintenance through contractors. And we're curious to see if we actually do it ourselves, is it going to be cheaper, slower or faster to scale? How does it fit in with how our residents look at city services? Is it something that they're going to really trust like trash and 311? Or is it going to be something that they really do prefer to get from the private market?

And also, we're interested in seeing with a more direct procurement power what we can do to support women and minority-owned businesses and really expand the economic opportunity component of our dollars. So moving to the next slide, I am not calling this best practices, because with a great deal of humility, like we're learning from New York City and LA and your white paper and lots of other places, I don't think we've developed any best practices yet.

So I came up with a different way of calling it. And I'm going to tell you a bit about what we've observed so far and then also some steps that we've taken and decisions that we've made because I think we're all in this together, figuring out how it works.

So in our RFPs, which we received over 35 responses to, which was really outstanding. And thank you to– I know there's several folks who responded who are on this call. We learned so much. And we hope to keep sharing our learnings with everyone involved in forums such as these. There were a variety of no-cost business models. And some of them more proven than others. We were really excited to test new ways of doing things.

One of the more ubiquitous ones, which will be no surprise to anyone here, is an advertising-based curbside and public charging. And really, what that raised for us is understanding what kind of urban design implications it was going to have. And it really raised the importance of having this fit into our community and urban design planning processes.

We also saw a big range in hardware, a lot of folks offering some of the same hardware where the service was actually the differentiator, and other places where the hardware itself was the differentiator. And at a no cost to the city basis, we saw very little appetite for level three right now. So there's so many asterisks that I can put next to this. But I get asked so many questions about what we saw in our RFP responses, and I wanted to share a little bit about that with you.

So where we are now on some of the steps that we've taken, we have awarded three contracts, and we're finalizing contracts now. If I get a bunch of questions and I answer them kind of evasively, it's because we're waiting to do a big announcement. But I will note, because I can't help myself, that It's Electric is one of the firms that we have awarded a contract to. And we will– we have not signed it, and we will finalize it all. And you'll hear all the more details later.

But since Shannon's on the call here, I wanted to clear that up. And also, we started getting ready for some of our city-owned stations I'd say in the late spring of last year, working with our utility partners and now doing a bit of community engagement in the neighborhoods. And when all is said and done, I am starting to realize that we are going to have about a one-year lead time.

Now, keep in mind this is the first time we've done it. But Gabe's words earlier about how this takes a long time really resonated with me because I think that– I don't expect that the one-year lead time will continue for everything. But what I have noticed is that, typically, with a municipal project, we would put it out to bid, we would sign a contract, and then we'd get started on stuff. And we would lose almost a year there if we hadn't started with a lot of the site design work on some of our stations.

We also have a new streamlined permitting process for our stations which I think will be a game changer for those of you who care about local permitting. We've moved our internal process from what normally would have been two hearings to zero hearings and 12 sign-offs from internal agencies to three for city-owned stations that we have sort of vetted already. And we hope that's going to make things go a lot faster.

And then, finally, I'll say that engagement has been really– has just started now in 2024. But what we're doing with a lot of work from across our city agencies that have a lot of community engagement experience is to really kind of lean into not just the notification and give us feedback approach but really into more education and cultivating users in the neighborhood who are excited about this or asking for it and have them be more of a kind of raise your hand and participate in this process back and forth.

So I think that's the end of my presentation there. And I'm– oh, no. You know what? I threw this in just in case you'd be interested. This is just a map to give you an idea. Purple is the five-minute walkshed for existing EV charging. And the green is how it will expand with the city-owned stations. And now just imagine how much more we'll be able to do with our public/private partnership stations as well. OK, so now I will wrap up and hand it over to Shannon.

Shannon Dulaney, It’s Electric: Thanks so much, Oliver. And thank you to the Joint Office for having me. I'm Shannon Dulaney. I'm the director of public affairs for It's Electric. And we are solving the biggest barriers that cities face in the deployment of public EV charging. Next slide, please. And this is really– we were founded in 2021 to solve this problem that we've all been talking about, which is that we are going to need 1 million level two chargers by the end of the decade.

And for context, we have about 126,000 now. And that's to serve the approximately 48 million EVs that are expected to be on the road by that time. But we also estimate– and the paper that Alex put out yesterday really spoke to this, but we estimate that there are 40 million American drivers who don't have access to a driveway or a garage. So that means that people don't have access to that at-home charging. Next slide.

And this really affects people who live in cities. And so when people are trying to make the switch to EVs, they want to make that switch to EVs, but they're faced with having to drive to big box stores or pay extra for a spot in a garage that has an EV charger, instead of being able to charge where they already park, which is the curb.

And so It's Electric is really trying to shift the conversation from charging as an opportunity when you're at the store or you're having to pull off the highway to get a charge, but instead really mimicking that overnight charging that people who do have garages or driveways already experience. And that's charging overnight where you already park. Next slide, please.

So there are a couple of innovations that It's Electric is doing to make this process go faster and to really scale so that we can hit that 1 million level two chargers by the end of the decade. And one is really trying to sidestep some of the problems that we see with the utility. When you have to do a new interconnection agreement with the utility, that can take up to 18 months. And the grid is going through a lot of changes right now, trying to electrify the transportation sector and the building sector. And it's really stressed.

So the founders of It's Electric really looked at what resources were already available in our cities. And we're looking at buildings as a way of powering our chargers. So instead of having to form that new interconnection, we are taking the spare capacity of the nearby buildings and pulling that power out to the curb. And this is, again, one of the biggest barriers that cities face.

And next slide will show just how that looks. So we're not talking about throwing a cord out the window over the sidewalk, which is something that's very common here where I live in Brooklyn. But instead, what we're going to do is have a shallow trench along the sidewalk and just pull that power out to the curb. And this is a one to two-day installation process, which is compared to a four to six-week installation process if you're having to go into the main roadway.

And it's a much faster and simpler installation process to really pull that power out from the curb. It mimics what you would do if you were going to install an at-home charger. So we think it makes things a lot simpler for cities when they're trying to think about how to install a lot of these chargers at scale. Next slide, please.

So, so far, we have a couple of chargers installed here in Brooklyn and in Detroit. And so excited that Oliver was able to share the news with you all that we'll also be going to Boston as well. But we're really excited about this because we offer the installation and the hardware at no cost to, both, our city partners and the private property owners that are our host properties. Why do host properties want to work with us? It's because we have revenue share for them.

So in exchange for essentially allowing us to lease their spare electrical capacity, we give a percentage of the revenue that that charger generates back to the private property owner. We also think that this is going to help with the conversation around just getting that community buy-in for these chargers being on the street because we have that revenue share that is going back to the property owner. Next slide.

We are also– this is the other big innovation from It's Electric and also slightly mentioned earlier. But we are the first US company to offer a detachable cable model. So we have a very small footprint charger. This is a 7-inch by 7-inch charging bollard. And then the charging cable itself lives in the car with the driver. And we think this is important for a couple of reasons. One, it's really to make sure that our city streets are clear when the charger isn't in use. And that's important from an accessibility perspective, from parents of young kids who have strollers, really making sure that the sidewalks aren't cluttered with lots of– with lots of cables.

Two, it's really important from a reliability perspective. Not only the federal standards require that chargers are up 97% of the time or more, but that's also another thing about assuaging this access anxiety for drivers who rely on the public charging network. If you always are encountering a charger, and it's not going to work, you're not going to have that confidence that you can switch to an EV. And cords are the number one thing that break on public chargers. And that's from vandalism, from user error of the mic drop of the cord, and then also just wear and tear.

But for us, if the cord breaks, we're just replacing it with that individual driver instead of having the entire charger down until you can roll a truck and have it repaired. And third, and also just increasingly important, is it helps us to sidestep the standards question. So the socket that you hear on this– or you see on the screen is a J1772 socket. But we can then give each driver the cord that works for their individual vehicle.

So if it's a CCS or if it's a Tesla/NAC standard, that is going to be a cord that can work for that individual driver. Municipalities aren't going to have to choose which one to install. And then as the fleet turns over over the next decade, all those chargers are not going to become defunct if they're one charging standard or the other. So we're really– we're really bullish on this particular model and think that it's a really great model for urban context in general. Next slide.

So again, we are in a couple of different places here in Brooklyn and in Detroit. And we're looking forward to deploying in more cities to come. As Gabe also mentioned at the top of the webinar– next slide– we were one of the grantees that received the Ride and Drive Electric grant. Next slide. And through that program, we put together a team of companies.

And we are going to be deploying 60 chargers in Justice40 neighborhoods across four cities. Those four cities are Alexandria, Jersey City, Detroit, and Los Angeles, so four very different contexts. We'll also be training 80 residents, so 20 in each city, how to be EVSE technicians. That's with our partner ChargerHelp. And then, finally, we're going to be collecting all of the data from the behind-the-meter approach, from the bring your own cord model, really testing out if that helps to speed along the process and save time and money in deploying EV chargers to create a tool kit for cities on how to do curbside charging.

I think that this is going to be of that next step of the white paper that was released yesterday in terms of that practical knowledge that cities need to bring curbside charging to their cities. So we're really excited about all this work that we're doing. And thanks so much for the time. And I'll turn it back over to you, Debs.

Debs Schrimmer: Great. Thanks, everyone. Really great to hear all of your presentations. I had some questions that came in from folks before the event as well as during the presentations. So I'll start asking some of those questions. And I think the first one would probably be for Oliver and Alex.

So we know there's a lot of competing demand for curb space as the curb plays a really important role in cities and serves a variety of uses, whether that's passenger loading, goods movement, outdoor dining, bikeshare stations, scooter drop zones, et cetera. And being able to preserve that flexibility as needs change is really important. So how can curbside charging be implemented in a way that takes into account the broader range of uses of the curb? And do you think about curbside charging in those contexts differently when you're working on curbside charging in more of a residential area than in a downtown context?

Alexander Epstein: Absolutely. You want to take a first shot at it, Oliver?

Oliver Sellers-Garcia: Yes, I will because I'm just going to be completely all over the place and say, like, yes to all of that, and it's very complicated. But what I will say is sort of leading with the last point that you made. One of the reasons that we are working with intent to work with It's Electric as well as some other companies is to actually give ourselves many more design and footprint options to test exactly that.

And really, because we see that there's an opportunity to have a different kind of design and flexibility that we're looking for on residential streets that, for example, are resident-only or no restriction, as opposed to hourly restrictions or pay parking, that is quite different from commercial areas, where we are looking for– where there's going to be a lot more competition with what to do with the curb.

I keep saying urban design over and over again. But what I really mean is the actual design of the footprint– of the charging station. But really, all of the other planning and constant work that happens in our neighborhoods that brings more activity onto the street is really important not just from a visual perspective but understanding that we want to be able to have neighborhood participation and visioning into what these neighborhoods are going to look like.

And that's another big part of building flexibility into it. So what I will say is that with our program, what we're intending is to put in our stations but understand that the equipment is not going to last forever and build the flexibility with everyone's expectations are that eventually we'll just perhaps swap them out for different options. That's why we're doing pilot programs.

And also to recognize that there are some minimum standards that we're just creating policies around. So for example, we haven't yet found a way to make a bicycle lane compatible with curbside charging or with bus-bike lanes that are going in in the next year or two. And so we've just basically taken those off the table from a sitting perspective. I think that there's some things that we're not going to be able to find a design solution to yet.

Alexander Epstein: And I would just add that it's not just the current condition, but it's the desired future condition of different streets as part of the network. So it would be important and ideal to coordinate any installations of curbside charging in coordination with parking and curb use studies, with transit priority studies, with bike lane and pedestrian network plans going out into future years to avoid the possibility of stranded assets and locking in curb use.

So this is one of many possible curb uses serving a public good. So I think just emphasizing– an emphasis on planning and, as Oliver was saying, urban design of future as well as current use.

Debs Schrimmer: Thanks, guys. That's helpful. It looks– Shannon, did you want to jump in on that? Or should we move to another question?

Shannon Dulaney: Yeah, I mean, I'll just say yes to what they both said and to say that It's Electric, we aren't necessarily looking to deploy on those commercial corridors but what we call our GC corners, where there's the commercial and then there's the residential street that spurs off. And so we really do think that making sure that we're addressing all of the city's transportation goals is really important. And so we think that that close partnership approach is what's going to work best for cities.

Debs Schrimmer: Great, thank you. So it looked like there were some questions around vandalism and theft and some of those sort of challenges around hardware living in the public right of way, being exposed to elements, and all sorts of things. I know, Shannon, you talked a little bit about It's Electric's bring your own cord model as a way to help mitigate against those issues. Could you maybe elaborate a bit more on that? And Alex, could you maybe share some of the other strategies that we're seeing and reference in our white paper that help look at solutions to this challenge?

Shannon Dulaney: Yeah, so I'll jump in first. So in terms of the vandalism, I know that sometimes people– it's not immediately obvious when the charging session is in session. The cord is actually locked on both the charging bollard side and then also on the vehicle side with a bring your own cord model. So it's not something that someone can just come and take that cord away while the cord is being utilized. You have to have your car key to unlock it when the session is done.

So in terms of concerns about it being stolen or vandalized while that charging session is– it's less likely that vandalism will occur. We do hear from a lot of our city partners that vandalism is on the rise with their more traditional chargers that have the attached cords. And so we do think that really stripping down the charger and not having very many things that can break on it is really important.

In addition to not having the cord on the charging bollard, you'll also see in those pictures that we don't have the touch screens. We don't have a lot of the other common things that can be broken or vandalized. And that's by design. One of our cofounders has a real background in public-facing design and making things that are sturdy that can live in the public realm and not get damaged. And so that is really the approach that we're bringing to this problem.

Alexander Epstein: Thanks, Shannon. I'll just add to that. There are perhaps two– well, maybe three categories of risk mitigation against vandalism, which is a real challenge. And we heard that talking with Los Angeles and talking with other cities. This is a real issue. And there are some fairly bold issues and incidents that do take place in terms of damaging the equipment.

The placement of the equipment is number one. If stations are sited where they're well used or they're well lit, they're less likely to suffer those consequences. Secondly is, as Shannon was alluding to, and there are various ways of doing this, but just reducing the number of parts that can break reduces the exposure. Reducing the number of smart elements, like screens or other electronics or cable management that can break or can be broken by passers-by, reduces the risk.

And number three would be another strategy. If those parts and smarts are there is elevating them higher. And you see this with pole-mounted solutions like Seattle and Melrose have deployed and other places as well, where the equipment is lowered only when the user requests it through an app or through another reservation payment method. So there are ways of getting around vandalism. It is a real challenge, just like with any other street furniture, especially electrified street furniture.

Debs Schrimmer: Thanks, Alex. Well, we're approaching nearly the end. So I'm going to ask a final question to Oliver, and then we'll close things out. Oliver, we as the Joint Office really see EVs as both an energy and transportation challenge and opportunity. And coordination across both those disciplines is really important. And coordinating with your utilities is key. So for folks that are starting to think about curbside charging, how do you recommend coordinating with a local utility on a curbside charging project? And what are some good questions to start asking?

Oliver Sellers-Garcia: Yeah, great question. So of course, it's all going to depend on the context that you're in and how involved your utility can get. In Massachusetts, we have utility programs that do a lot of the underground work. But that's about it. And so for us, it's been really taking the approach of– I'm going to talk now about our city-owned stations that I mentioned we've been working on for almost a year before they hit the ground– has been to really work through their processes but make it clear that we're all doing something new together and that we are entering this agreement– entering this partnership to make changes on both sides.

So the permitting changes that I mentioned, I think they were not driven by Eversource, our power utility, but are very much raised because they were concerned they weren't going to be able to meet our timeline desires because of that. I think the other thing that is really important with our utility is just– I mean, I'm sorry to say something so basic, but we are just including them in the project, right?

So we basically have a– they are part of the project team, whereas before, when we have done, for example, off-street charging, they're pretty much just sort of get in touch with them when we need them for the service that they're providing. So to the extent that it fits in your regulatory framework, I would say try to bring your utility in as closely as possible. And that's the advice that I have there.

Debs Schrimmer: Great. Thanks so much. Well, we are almost at time. So I want to make sure that folks know where to go for more information. Again, you can check out our new white paper on curbside charging and multifamily and multimodal emerging practices on our website, driveelectric.gov/publications. Again, I mentioned that we have a technical assistance team. And we'd love for you to reach out and learn more about projects you're working on and how we can help support.

And if you'd like to learn more about the Joint Office's funding opportunity, the Ride and Drive Electric program, we announced awardees, including It's Electric, about two weeks ago. And we supported a variety of topics around workforce development and extreme weather events and resiliency as well as community charging solutions. So definitely take a look at that. And you can learn more about what we're up to.

So again, thank you so much for joining. You can sign up on our website to stay tuned about more webinars, events, and upcoming funding opportunities. And we will be making the recording and slides available online soon. So, thank you so much, everyone. Have a good afternoon.