Plugged In With the Joint Office (Text Version)

This is a text version of Plugged In With the Joint Office, presented on Dec. 10, 2024.

Plugged In With the Joint Office Webinar

STEPHEN LOMMELE: Hey, everyone. I'm Steve Lommele. I'm the Communications and Education Program Manager here at the Joint Office. Welcome to today's webinar, “Plugged In With the Joint Office”. We're going to get started here in just a second as all of our participants trickle in.

Alrighty. Looks like we have a critical mass. Excited to have you with us today. We're going to be checking in on some of the exciting developments in the Joint Office over the last quarter or so in our webinar, “Plugged In With the Joint Office”. So, we've got some great panelists from the Joint Office. We're also going to get to hear from our executive director, Gabe Klein. So, I think this will be an informative opportunity for all of you to learn about what we've been up to recently. Next slide, please.

So, just a few tips here. Controls are located at the bottom of your screen. If you aren't appearing, you can just hover your cursor over the bottom edge, and they should pop up.

We are going to be taking questions that were submitted in advance. However, if we have time at the end, we will try to take any additional questions. So, we encourage you to use the Q&A button at the bottom to submit questions. And then, again, if there's time at the end, we'll review those questions.

And then, I would encourage you, if you have a question that isn't answered, to please follow up with us. You can visit driveelectric.gov and click on the “Contact” section of the website and submit a question, and we'll be sure to answer any follow-up questions that are submitted.

The webinar today is being recorded, and it may be posted on the Joint Office website or used internally. So, if you do speak during the webinar or use video, you are presumed to consent to the recording and use of your voice or image. Next slide, please.

So, our agenda today: I'm going to start out with a quick polling question just to understand what sector all of you are from, and then we'll hear from our Executive Director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, Gabe Klein. And then, we've got specific program presentations from some of our program managers and subject matter experts. And then, we'll be going through some questions at the end of the webinar today. Next slide, please.

So, our first polling question. If the team could pull that up, we'll take a minute or so to get some responses here. We're interested in understanding what sector you represent—whether you're with a government, private sector, nonprofit. If you could just take a minute to answer that question, that helps us understand who we've got on the line today.

And once we have a critical mass of respondents, would you please show us the results, Jane? Great. So, here we go. Lots of folks from state governments. I know we've got quite a following with our state DOTs and energy offices, whom we work with very closely. Some federal government partners. And then, a lot from local and regional government. I'm sure a lot of you are working on Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) discretionary grant program, the loan and transit program, all that great stuff. So excited to have you. And then, our private sector folks from EVSE networks and manufacturers, all great to have you with us today.

So, with that, we are going to turn it over to our Executive Director Gabe Klein, who's going to make some introductory remarks. Gabe, happy to have you with us today. And if you could advance the next slide, please.

GABE KLEIN: Thank you so much, Steve. I got to stop slouching in my chair here. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. It's nice to have hundreds of people on the line tuning in from industry, from states, and cities. I'm going to give some perspective on the electric charging and fueling infrastructure, mobility ecosystem, and what we've recently accomplished. And when I say we, I mean, all of us.

We're actually coming up, by the way, on our third birthday this week for the Joint Office since we were established by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. So, as this is a kind of startup in government, the Joint Office is focused on, as you know, accelerating an electrified transportation system that's affordable, convenient, and reliable. And there's a lot I could talk about, but I want to focus on two main things: momentum of charging infrastructure across multiple aspects of mobility and how it's truly becoming an actual ecosystem and then the new technology innovations that will help improve the user experience. I love this slide. Thanks, Kaitlin, for putting it together. Let's start with this momentum of what's actually going in the ground and what it means.

Almost exactly one year ago today, Dec. 13, 2023, the first federally funded charging station in America opened in Ohio. And now, we've got 13 states operating hundreds of charging ports. And we've got a massive amount that are in some form of construction or design. More than 24,800 federally funded ports are actually underway nationwide. So, what does this really mean? Next slide.

So, the national network has actually doubled since the end of 2020, or beginning of 2021. And back then, we had about 96,000 ports, at the beginning of ‘21. And now, there's actually, as of today, almost 205,000 publicly available charging ports. We've more than doubled. And our work is really to act as a catalyst for the whole system to take off and evolve. And that's really the point here. We very much are a convener. We work to align public and private and point people in industry to where things are going so we can skate to where that puck is going to be and help everybody to get there faster. So, we'd like to talk a lot about the direct line between all the various federal dollars and the more than 25,000 charging stations that are either complete or in progress.

But it's really the bigger picture of the ecosystem doubling that matters. And there's so many different—we were talking about this morning—there's so many different incentives in IRA, in the IIJA. It's hard to actually link every investment outcome to the actual dollars, particularly when you have state incentives, and local incentives, and private money. And that's OK. It's really about building this network, this national network, for the consumers and speeding up the adoption of sustainable mobility and transportation, whether it's for business or personal use. Next slide.

And speaking of catalyzing a whole system in the $19 billion that we support here in the Joint Office, it would be irresponsible, when talking about catalyzing the system, if we didn't talk about not just charging infrastructure, and charging along highways, and in cities but also the rolling stock that makes it work.

With the Clean School Bus program, the Low & No FTA program, which we also support, and working with various government agency partners to help school districts and transit agencies participate in electrification holistically, like looking at the entire system that they have to put in place to make this work. And it's really another example of how electric transportation is an interconnected ecosystem and how we can get scale when we use our resources to tackle it as a whole versus just the individual parts.

So, that's infrastructure momentum. And you can see the results in terms of the number of buses that will be replaced. And there's a lot of charging infrastructure going in to support it. And then, ultimately, what's exciting is that a lot of these vehicles will also function as a support system for our grid with vehicle-to-grid integration, which comes to my last slide. Next.

So, the second impact area that I want to talk about is innovation writ large, and technology, and how it actually is going to provide outcomes, and then also enhancing the user experience.

So, with the Joint Office, we are obsessed with unlocking innovation quickly and sustainably so it can scale, particularly as it relates to the user experience. So, it can't just be a charger going in the ground and turning it on. We think about, “How does the driver go from leaving their residence to make a short trip, for instance, in their neighborhood, and then commute across town to work? And how do we match a seamless charging experience with that?”

Sarah Hipel is going to speak in a bit, our acting CTO. She'll fill in some of those details. But one major advancement that we announced last week with SAE and its industry consortium group is something called universal plug-in charge. It's a major digital upgrade to the back end of the EV charging ecosystem. In the short term, once it's rolled out in 2025, drivers will be able to pull up any car to any public charging station and start charging right away. So, you won't need an app. You won't need payment. You'll just plug-in and go. Easier than gas. Longer-term universal plug-in charge is one of those enabling technologies that unlocks a lot of other cool features in the future. And some of those will come sooner, and some will be in the longer term.

So, we talked about vehicle-to-grid integration. This is one of those enabling technologies for that. It's also another reason to choose electric vehicles. It's going to be easier to fuel, frictionless, no extra step for payment processing, like this driver in this photo, and, as someone who's spent a lot of time on the private side and in startups, what I love about this is it's an example of how government plays a supporting role to accelerate industry progress—government as a catalyst. Or, as one of my bosses, Secretary Granholm, likes to say, this will be built by the private sector but enabled by the public sector.
So, what we did here was provide expertise and guidance, as well as technical testing and using the power of our own industry experience with the people that we've brought into the Joint Office, plus research best practices from our national labs network.

And then, of course, the skills of SAE, and the awesome backing and need from the private sector. And this is exactly in line with our mission that I referenced at the beginning. We want to open up new ways to use sustainable electricity and accelerate its impact on transportation. And with that, I will turn it back to you, Steve. Again, thanks to all of you for coming.

STEPHEN LOMMELE: Great. Thanks so much, Gabe. And next up, we're going to move to our esteemed group of Joint Office experts. So, if you could advance the next slide, please.

We've got starting us out, Linda Bailey, who’s going to focus on how we're working with grantees to deploy faster and what best practices we're seeing. And then, we'll hear from Eric Wood. He's going to cover some of the latest in how we manage and share data across the EV ecosystem. We heard a little bit already about some of the stuff that Sarah has been working on. Gabe talked about plug-in charge. But Sarah is going to be talking about the technologies we're watching and details on some of our most recent work.

And then, Debs Schrimmer is going to talk a little bit about our work in community and urban charging. And then, we'll wrap up with Kevin Miller, who will check in on freight and medium- and heavy-duty strategies and how to get involved. And so, after that, we'll have a few minutes for Q&A. But I'm going to turn it over to Linda. So, Linda, if you could take us away, please.

LINDA BAILEY: Hi. Thanks, Steve. I'm happy to be here with you today talking about how we're supporting our grantees and the field out there who are putting in these great charging stations. The first thing I want to focus on is the NEVI program—the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. We work very closely with all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, on this. We came together in a meeting in late September with our partners NASEO and AASHTO, the state energy offices, and the state DOTs to really understand what the best practices are and help them share with one another and work with their stakeholders.

This is a really critical way that we've done our technical assistance is not just bringing the technical side to it but also the know-how to get things on the ground, and making those connections between the public and the private sector, I think, is really key to that. The progress we've seen so far is pretty amazing. We have basically almost 900 stations awarded by 36 states, a total of 893 as of today, to be specific. And all of those stations, we expect to see a significant build-out in 2025. And we've already seen some acceleration here at the end of 2024 on that build-out.

I think that the stations are achieving a new level of quality that was stipulated in the bill, and I think that's really a critical part of how we're working together with the states to build a great network at the end of the day. We've even seen some of our first CFI grantees bring their projects out, and we've launched some internal support and peer-to-peer support for those CFI grantees as well.

And I did want to focus today—or highlight, a little bit, our Clean Bus Planning Awards program. We basically provide through our partners at the National Renewable Energy Lab—NREL—we provide Clean Bus Planning Awards. And I would really encourage anyone who's interested in this to reach out and apply. We have space in the program, and it does admit awardees on a rolling basis. So, definitely reach out if there's interest and questions about moving to an electrified fleet with any of those bus fleets, either the school bus or transit buses.

And finally, I just want to say, we welcome questions. And coming into the technical assistance program, we've answered over 7,000 questions to date as part of our technical assistance efforts, and certainly welcome any questions today, and look forward to speaking more about this later. And with that, I guess, I could hand it off to the next speaker, who is Eric Wood.

ERIC WOOD: Yeah, thanks, Linda. Eric Wood here with the Joint Office. I'll talk a little bit about some of the data initiatives that we have ongoing within the office. I would say all of the initiatives that I'm going to talk about today are really oriented on trying to support data-informed decision-making. That includes data-informed decision-making not only for drivers but also for planners and people involved with electric utilities to support the efficient deployment of this infrastructure.

So, the first initiative that I'll talk about is the Joint Office’s support for the Alternative Fuels Data Center Station Locator. Gabe mentioned it earlier, but this is our primary resource for tracking deployment of charging infrastructure across the country, including the over-200,000 ports deployed in the U.S. to date. So, this is a really key data enabler for drivers to be able to identify the necessary charging equipment in public locations to support long trips and daily driving.

And we see this evidenced by the tens of millions of hits that happen every year, with drivers querying the AFDC UI and also pulling data from mobile devices. In addition to exposing this information directly through the AFDC, we also support other applications—other mobile applications having access to this data through API and third-party mapping. So, it's kind of helping develop this data ecosystem and support access to this information across multiple stakeholders—again, for the benefit of drivers, ultimately.

The second initiative that I'll mention is EV-ChART. This is a platform that has been developed over the past year or so to facilitate the data reporting that's required of federally funded stations. So, all federally funded infrastructure is required to report information back to the Joint Office on the cost to deploy, reliability, and uptime, as well as utilization and the use of the network.

And it's been really exciting to see this data start coming in. We've received enough data to estimate that over four million miles of EV driving has been supported using federally deployed stations to date, which is really exciting. But it only scratches the surface. The data that we show today is from just a handful of stations.

And Gabe mentioned it earlier, but there's almost 25,000 stations in progress right now that will be coming online over the next few years. And likely even more than that. And so, this is quickly going to become the preeminent dataset on federally funded and publicly accessible charging infrastructure, certainly in the U.S., maybe even in the world. And we're really excited about that—primarily, again, because it's going to support our ability to refine these programs, both at the state and the federal level, to ensure that the public dollars are having the most bang for the buck and being used efficiently.

And then, finally, we're also supporting ongoing research and development efforts. This is primarily happening through the Department of Energy's network of national labs. And really, the goal of the work that we're doing here is to expose publicly available tools that are going to be used to deploy infrastructure in a more efficient manner. That can include things as simple as helping people identify the utility in their local area that they need to contact in order to proactively get the connection process started.

It also includes things like demand estimation at the city, state, and corridor level that are going to allow people to understand, as more and more vehicles come on the road, what the necessary infrastructure to support those vehicles might look like. And so, with that, I will pass it on to the next panelist. Thank you.

SARAH HIPEL: Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sarah Hipel. I'm the acting chief technology officer for the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. And as Gabe mentioned earlier, I'm going to talk about both the technology that we're following and the technology that we're hoping to lead on.

So, I noticed from the chat in the Q&A that a couple of you at least are familiar or heard about the universal plug-in charge announcement and conversation that happened last week. So, this is a technology that we are following on, and we help provide conversation, vision, subject matter expertise in this to the private sector while they lead. And then, we enable and support testing and other kind-of expertise in engineering around as it continues. So, I'll talk a little bit about that, and then I'll talk about a technology that we are helping to lead on next.

So, universal plug & charge is pinned up by a technical concept. I won't go too far into it, but it's called public key infrastructure, and it is a digital-certificate-style technology that is widely used. So, it's used in 911, in aviation, it's how your computer knows how to recognize the banking system that you use when you log in. So, electric vehicle charging will now start utilizing this technology. In fact, it has. Many of the vehicles are equipped with it. Even if they are not currently using it, they do … Many of them come kind-of baked in with this technology.

This technology has been underway for development in one-off isolated, either by vehicle manufacturers or by charging station manufacturers and network operators, for quite some time or in a development environment and in testing environments. And now, we're seeing it—that it's going to move into a production environment. So, now, nationally, this enabling technology will be available kind of coast to coast, end to end.

And what this will do is—it is owned—housed by the Society of Automotive Engineers—SAE—and they have a pre-competitive environment where these automakers, and network operators, and charging station manufacturers were able to come together to work, over the last several years, to develop and test a digitized framework called a certified trust list, where various plug & charges could come together and combine their plug & charge implementations into the certified trust list, which will help to have a single uniform approach that involves rigorous auditing and rigorous testing. And then, as it moves into calendar year 2025, they will have the opportunity to roam with each other, should they like to do that and should they decide commercially that that's the right move for their business. But now, we have the infrastructure to have—the digital infrastructure to have interoperable, interoperating roaming plug & charge.

So, we're very excited about that. So, that's something the Joint Office has been keeping a close eye on. And we have provided testing support, both happy path and adversarial testing, through our national lab partners and NREL for this public key infrastructure technology over the last couple of years. And we're looking forward to finding more ways to support this development as it moves forward.

One of the other things that we're helping to lead on is—it's a pretty wonky topic here, but I'm going to do my best to explain it in a way that is easy to understand or is just approachable. So, we talk a lot about Pmax in the deep depths of electric vehicle charging. So, most of the time, when we talk about how to manage power and power sharing for electric vehicle charging, we focus on dynamic power sharing between high-power charging stations. In this case, the goal is usually to reduce the input power requirements, like for a high-powered station, right? However, with AC charging, whether it's level 1—just the cable that comes with your vehicle—or even a level 2 station, they have significant flexibility in shifting load because the departure time, or when you need to leave, is usually in the scale of hours, right, instead of minutes.

So, this load shifting can be controlled by the grid, and it can also incorporate on-site renewables, and generation flexibility, other kinds of fluctuation that you might see. You might be able to put tariff in or pricing information as part of the overall combined signal for when the vehicle should charge, shift charging, halt charging, resume charging.

So, the Joint Office has contributed to smart charging functionality in the modules that go from the charging station back to their back-end cloud through our EVerest open-source project that we work with the Linux Foundation on. The smart charging module accepts power constraints from multiple sources and generates a composite schedule that can change at any point in time. And at a recent CharIN Testival, we showed how current limits from grid operators such as the MIDAS system in California, charging network providers, and local power control inputs were combined into a single Pmax schedule, or this dynamic schedule, that can be sent to the car in an ongoing iteration as it's plugged in.

So, we're starting to see the combination of grid factors, charging stations, and vehicles all come together to have dynamic charging sessions that can shift, shed, or shimmy loads in a secure and connected way if we use the universal plug-in charge system. So, that's it for me today. And I'll go ahead and pass to the next presenter.

DEBS SCHRIMMER: Thanks, Sarah. Hi, everyone. My name is Debs Schrimmer, and I'm the senior advisor for community and urban charging. These last few months, we've been very focused on kicking off community charging projects, such as the charging and fueling infrastructure—CFI—projects or the $46 million of funding coming out of the Joint Office's Ride and Drive funding program. We're also looking to award our Communities Taking Charge program soon.

We've also had a lot of really great public and private sector engagement and had two major topics emerge as areas of interest for us to dive deeper into. So, first up is curbside charging. Right now, over a dozen U.S. cities around the country are deploying curbside charging programs, and they're doing things like creating permitting processes to have charging in the public right of way, they're setting up utility rate structures, they're undergoing site selections, and they're determining how to enforce these spaces. So, there's a lot to figure out, and we can help by being a convener of public sector practitioners working on this issue.

So, to support these cities, our new Joint Office Curbside Office Hours is designed to connect folks, share challenges and ideas, and advance best practices that are coming directly from those working in the field. We have a lot of CFI awardees, folks from our Ride and Drive program, and other communities working on curbside. So, we'll be bringing together those folks who are trying to achieve similar outcomes in their communities. And this is just the first topical office hours we're setting up, and we're excited to have more of those come in the year ahead.

Next up, an update on low-speed vehicles. These are also called neighborhood electric vehicles. And these are four-wheeled vehicles with a top speed of 25 miles per hour. And I do want to clarify that these are a distinct vehicle class from golf carts and are designed for on-road use and are actually street-legal today.

We've had a lot of interest from municipalities looking to get more resources on how to support these vehicles in a couple of different ways, whether it's for their residents who are wanting to use these vehicles for personal travel, communities are looking to start shared-mobility passenger services like circulators or on-demand shuttles using low-speed vehicles, and many communities are even thinking about how to use these vehicles for law enforcement, groundskeeping, park operations, maintenance vehicles, delivery, and other municipal fleet use cases.

So, we think this is a really exciting topic to dive into, particularly because more than half of all daily vehicle trips in the United States are five miles or less. So, these are a really great option to right-size trips and provide more affordable transportation options. So, stay tuned. Next year, we'll be putting out a white paper where we'll be diving into this topic, looking at charging and infrastructure needs for low-speed vehicles, curb management considerations, and other policies that communities can adopt to support these vehicles. Thanks. And with that, I'll hand it over to Kevin.

KEVIN MILLER: Good afternoon, and good morning. I will touch on medium- and heavy-duty vehicle issues. So, three quick points first. If you're not already familiar with the zero-emission freight corridor strategy, I'll share a little background for context. This strategy was published in April of this year to set a comprehensive approach to accelerate improvements to freight networks that are intended to increase efficiency, enhance economic competitiveness, bolster national security, support clean communities, and generally just make it easier for fleet operators to do what they already do so well using zero-emission technologies. It's intended to align and unlock cross-sector investments in zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicles and related infrastructure, as well as to support and accelerate grid and hydrogen planning efforts.

It was an interagency strategy across the federal government that partnered with many stakeholders in the private sector and in the nonprofit sector to help identify a four-phase progression to support a zero-emission freight system, both where it's needed today and where it will be needed over time. So, if you haven't had a chance to dig in yet, and this kind of thing seems of interest, the report is available on our website, but, perhaps more germane, we have subsequently released GIS data layers, so if you've got planning efforts, you know, whether you're public, private, nonprofit, whomever it is, if you want to engage with that data directly, that data is available. And we look forward to dialogue on that because it's an ongoing iterative process, and we want to make sure that these types of tools are used and useful as we think about some of the unique needs on the medium- and heavy-duty vehicle side.

Relatedly, the Federal Highway Administration and Joint Office together posted a request for information that closed on Nov. 12th. That RFI sought input in four areas related to medium- and heavy-duty vehicle—battery electric vehicles. This isn't about saying one technology over the other, but there are unique issues in any given technology stack. So, we wanted to dig into—in the topic of battery electric vehicles for vehicles classes 4 through 8—what are the unique needs for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles and fleet operators, what are unique vehicle charging patterns, what types of charging technologies and standardization issues need to be considered at the medium-and-heavy-duty-vehicle level, and what types of related workforce, supply chain, and manufacturing issues should we dig into.

So, we greatly appreciate all of the comments that came in. We're working through—to review and process those, and we'll look forward to next steps. And in the interim, as we continue to work on that, please don't be a stranger. We want to make sure that the Joint Office is helping to build bridges between energy and transportation, policy areas, markets, stakeholders. And we know that what works on the light-duty-vehicle side doesn't often apply or translate on the medium-and-heavy-duty-vehicle side.

So, the work that we're doing, we want it to be used, useful, and valuable to you. So, no matter where you sit in the medium-and-heavy-duty-vehicle space, this is an open invitation for dialogue, and we look forward to finding more ways to help make these choices easier for folks out in the real world. So, with that—that's just a quick summary. Thanks so much for the opportunity to update, and really look forward to continuing the dialogue.

STEPHEN LOMMELE: Great. Thanks so much, Kevin, and to all of our other panelists. Now, we're going to jump into some questions that we've gotten in advance, as well as some that have come in while we've been speaking. So, I think this first one is probably for you, Linda. We have a question from an attendee in Wisconsin who asked for insights on promoting rural level 2 charging. So, Linda, do you have any insights on this topic?

LINDA BAILEY: Yeah. Thanks for that question, Steve. There's a great resource on our website—and I hope Austin or someone can maybe put that in the chat—that I definitely refer you to on rural charging. We also do, obviously, take questions specific to specific sites, sorry, through our intake form, which is on our website. I guess super-high level, I would say it's really critical. And for every site, it is critical to understand where utility is, what the power supply is at every specific location, but especially in rural areas, where that might be much more sparse. I would definitely recommend close coordination with the utility for capacity at each site to identify the lowest-cost options for those rural sites. And that's one of our big tips, I guess.

And there's also some specific things you might be thinking about for utilization rate relative to rate of return. And that's specifically for public entities that might be subsidizing stations, considering how much that subsidy needs to be given the utilization—the projected utilization rate. Some of the states have done some really interesting work to try and really dive in on traffic levels, projected traffic levels in 2030, projected EV, market penetration. Just as one example, Kentucky has a really thorough—give them a shout-out—have a really thorough model that went into projected utilization at every site on their alternative fuel corridors that they're building out as part of NEVI. And so, they have a really deep understanding of that. And if anybody is interested in figuring it out, might want to look at their methodology on that as well.

STEPHEN LOMMELE: Great. Thanks so much, Linda. Our next question—I think this might be for Sarah. And it is focused on digital infrastructure. So, the question is, “What's the latest on V2G—vehicle-to-grid—and microgrid options?”

SARAH HIPEL: Great. Thanks for the question. So, the latest on the V2G is that, right now, the Joint Office and, maybe more specifically—well, EERE, which is a Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy section of the Department of Energy, and the Joint Office—more specifically, we can probably focus on speaking for our office, have been really thinking about V2G. And I will even be more specific in saying V1G.

So, we have been thinking about managed charging—is how I'll define V1G. So, that's the single direction of managing, which is being able to start, stop, de-rate, and then resume again a charge session. So, the latest on our activities for this is that we have, on our website, information about a funding opportunity announcement called Communities Taking Charge, and the third topic of that funding opportunity is on managed charging. We expect to announce what our selections are for that funding opportunity imminently, either toward the end of this month or the beginning of next month is what we expect. So, those projects that will be selected—the requirements of the funding opportunity were that they are able to execute managed charging according to the CFR 680 requirements, which is effectively a stack of open standards. If you're in the standards world, that would be like the ISO 15118, OCPP, and OCPI standards—to execute an end-to-end implementation of managed charging.

So, we are really excited about what we've seen come in for that, and we'll be excited to make those selections and announcements. And then, I'll also say the Joint Office has a three-lab-led and 90-private-sector-participant consortium called the Charging Experience Consortium. Although, we call it ChargeX, for short. And the Department of Energy, that EERE group I was just talking about, has a consortium as well called EVs@Scale. And we've combined efforts of both the lab participants as well as the private sector participants to focus on three managed charging topics in order to do, kind of, like, this FMEA “find a problem, fix a problem” style of solutions—like implementation-in-the-field type of solutions—on matching the state machine of the vehicle in the charging system itself, on KPI development, and on some known things that we know are gaps in managed charging, like a pilot wake—the ability to have all the devices go to sleep from charging and then wake back up and resume in the session where they are.

So, we are already underway on those activities for this kind-of very specific V1G managed charging, and we will keep you all updated on where we go with that as we make more developments.

STEPHEN LOMMELE: Thanks, Sarah. Yeah, and I'll remind everyone again at the end of the webinar, but we certainly do want to keep you all updated on developments. And a great way to stay on top of things is to visit driveelectric.gov and go to our news section, where we post important news updates, and to subscribe to our email newsletter that we send out every other week.

So, with that, we're going to move on to a question here. I think this one is for you, Debs. And it's specifically focused on urban charging. So, the person pointed out that EV charging challenges for apartment dwellers are a major barrier to widespread EV adoption in big cities. And I think I saw a question just here, again, about someone living in Brooklyn and having limited access to EV charging and having to travel 25 minutes to a supercharger. So, Debs, can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing currently that's addressing some of these barriers?

DEBS SCHRIMMER: Sure, Steve. Thanks, everyone, for the question. This is a really big issue for the Joint Office to focus on if we want to be successful with our vision of making it possible for everyone to ride and drive electric. Right now, about 80% of charging happens at home, but that's not possible for everyone, as you've pointed out, with challenges of apartment dwellers.

So, just to put a little bit of data behind that. Nationally, about 30% of all U.S. households are multifamily housing. So, this includes buildings like apartments, condos, townhouses, and mixed-use developments. And about 63% of all rental households in the United States are multifamily housing units. So, being a renter can also add additional challenges to being able to charge, besides not having dedicated access to off-street parking or a garage. You might not be able to secure permission from your landlord to install EV charging. So, this is a really meaty issue for us to dive into. Many folks in multifamily housing choose to not own a car because some of those challenges, but the majority do. About 76% of multifamily housing renters still have at least one privately owned vehicle.

So, you know, unsurprisingly, multifamily housing is a big area for the public sector to invest in, and it's one of the key project merit criteria that was actually being evaluated in rounds 1A and 1B, as well as the current round of the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure program. So, applicants are being rated on a variety of criteria, but that includes the extent to which their project addresses neighborhood and multifamily housing charging.

So, many of the projects that we've seen get funded through 1A and 1B rounds are focused on solutions, and they're doing things like partnering with housing authorities, they're citing publicly accessible charging stations near multifamily housing properties, they're utilizing on-street curbside charging as a solution, and they're deploying lots of level 2 charging for overnight use.

And I really want to stress that you don't just need DC fast charging in your community charging network. Lower-level charging is much more affordable to deploy. And the longer time it takes to charge actually is okay because drivers can easily charge their cars overnight while their car is parked, and they can also access lower rates of charging since there's less demand on the electric grid at night, and you can charge during off-peak hours. So, I think there's a lot of exciting ways to think about different solutions for apartment dwellers.

And I'd love, if someone from the Joint Office team that's managing the chat could, maybe, put a link for a resource we have. The Joint Office, actually, earlier this year, put out a really great white paper exploring emerging solutions to multifamily housing charging, looking at other implementations like smart outlets, and panels, things like battery-enabled fast charging, mobile charging, using street lights, and utility poles, and other ideas.

So, I think there's a lot of innovation in this space. And I'm excited to see more of those solutions come online in the coming years. Thanks.

STEPHEN LOMMELE: Thanks, Debs. So, we've got a question here. People are always curious about the growth of the charging network, and I know Gabe talked a little bit about how we've doubled the size of the national charging network since 2021, which is pretty significant. Now, more than 200,000 publicly available charging ports across the country.

But I'm interested, maybe, in hearing from Linda and Kevin a little bit about what's the impact of this. How rapidly is the charging infrastructure growing? Is it growing the same—at the same pace for light-duty vehicles and medium-duty, heavy-duty vehicles? Can you just shed a little bit more light on the topic, maybe talking more about impact than actual numbers?

LINDA BAILEY: Sure, I can start. And Kevin, come on screen if you want to also chat about medium- and heavy- duty.

So, I think, from a local perspective, there's a lot of change happening. Obviously, this is not just funded by NEVI—the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. That doubling of ports that we just talked about, or that Steve reiterated—that's public and private investments. And again, those are only publicly available ports. That's not even getting into privately available ports in people's driveways, garages, etc.

I think one of the metrics we've looked at is—focus on those corridors—those alternative fuel corridors that are being built out by the states right now. We've gone already, since 2021, from about a third coverage, if you use that kind-of 50-mile-gap metric, to closer to—I think the last number I saw was 57%. So, that means on 50% of those major roadways, which are typically being used between—between destinations for farther trips, we have really good coverage on over half now. We went from, like I said, 34%, I think it was, to 57%. And we're projecting by the end of next year to be closer to 70%. And that does, again, vary by state and by region, but we're getting some really good coverage areas.

And we're also doing some infill where you have a state that has a lot of uptake. It's not just having one station locally. It's having enough stations. It's enough ports to service all the EVs in that area. And I think we're really seeing a sea change in that. And we've seen a lot of really great progress also on opening up some of the private networks. Sarah Hipel could come on and talk about that, but we have two private networks that have now said that they'll be opening up: Tesla and Rivian. And that's going to, again, just create much more opportunities for everybody in their local area to—and on long trip routes to recharge. OK. Kevin.

KEVIN MILLER: And then, I—I'll add a little bit to note that, instead of just rattling off a lot of the announcements and the increase in availability of infrastructure for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, I think one of the things I want to flag is, especially when we start thinking about scale in terms of deployment on the medium-and-heavy-duty-vehicle side, in particular, the huge variety in use cases, and needs, and charging types.

Linda just mentioned public access versus private. That becomes a much more significant consideration on the fleet side. To what extent is this a fleet use case that relies on public access infrastructure or dedicated depot-style refueling? So, making sure that we're aware of where the infrastructure is going, how it's being used, so that we don't try and fit a square peg in a round hole, is really important.

But if we try and think of it at a systems level, it's not just going to be about, “Are we tracking the number of ports?” It's really, “How do we align the planning time horizon for the transportation sector, the freight sector, and the energy system?” Right? Which are not typically done in tandem and haven't had to be historically. So, as we start to see a greater deployment projected, more vehicles being manufactured, more infrastructure being manufactured, more transformers and electrical system equipment being manufactured in the U.S. to support transportation electrification for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, we need to make sure that the power is going to be there.

And similarly, if you think about it from a hydrogen perspective—we've got great colleagues at the Department of Energy, the hydrogen fuel team there is fantastic—but, like, trying to think through zero emission more broadly, let's make sure that the hydrogen pipeline infrastructure is there and that we're aligning those types of clean hydrogen generation with potential use cases that work for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.

So, identifying opportunities not just for counting, tracking, and accelerating the deployment of ports and dispensers for clean medium- and heavy-duty vehicle fuels but also making sure that that fuel supply is there by aligning those planning horizons. And we're seeing that happen more and more. Just recently, in New York state, since a lot of these decisions happen at the state level, it's out of federal hands, but we can try and ensure that the heads are talking to each other and those efforts are aligned.

In New York recently, there were filings by utilities to support proactive load growth in advance of some of the specific deployments being requested by a fleet operator, knowing that there are key areas of no regret where you can make improvements given the trends towards electrification across, you know, not just transportation but other sectors—places where we can get those planning horizons a little bit more closely aligned so that it’s—we're never leaving a fleet operator with stations in a supply room that they can't install because they can't get energized.

So, that's one of the key things that we're working on. We're seeing a lot of advancements happening at the state level, and we're trying to create more resources to help inform local, state, and regional efforts to align those energy planning needs with transportation and freight planning needs.

STEPHEN LOMMELE: Thank you, Kevin and Linda. It's an exciting time to see the growth in infrastructure and all of the planning endeavors by different states. I know—just like to reemphasize that we've got 50 states plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia that are all working to advance charging infrastructure to support lots of different needs along highway corridors and in communities. So, it is pretty exciting.

And maybe a little bit of a segue here. I know Eric highlighted earlier the Alternative Fueling Station Locator as a resource in terms of what current infrastructure looks like, and Sarah has also talked a little bit about that. There are other resources out there that do track availability of charging infrastructure. What do we do to make sure that all of these resources kind of have the same data?

And thinking specifically about the AFDC Station Locator, what should people do if there are stations they see in other databases that aren't available on the station locator? So, I'll turn that over to Sarah and Kevin—or, sorry, Sarah and Eric.

SARAH HIPEL: So, there's a few things that you can do. And Eric is the SM—the subject matter expert for the station locator, so I'll let him speak on that specifically. But I'm going to talk high level on getting data and maybe even standards kind of in one place. I was like a pain for standardized engineering.

So, the Joint Office—I’m gonna—I am going to come back to data and locations in a moment—but I think the Joint Office … I always say that I'm sure this happens in other places in the government, I have just not seen it happen yet. And I'm from the private sector until actually pretty recently, so my government experience is admittedly kind of limited. But the Joint Office is just all up in the mix on engineering, and being in the field, and private sector, and we have really made a big push to drive towards standard best—standard and best practices, as well as standard engineering. And we are doing that in a variety of ways through standards organizations, whether—I mentioned SAE earlier, or IEEE, there's the ISO organization. So, we are tracking, with subject matter expertise, across a variety of engineering implementations and practices and developing code directly.

When I was talking about the, you know, having your car charged in an intelligent way based on signals of demand, and flexibility, and what your schedule is, and all of that, having that being deployed directly into open-source code bases, that then is implemented and picked up on charging controllers throughout the industry, helps to drive standardization horizontally across the system. So, if we can get suppliers implementing things in common ways and then going to these testing events, joining 90-private-sector-member consortia to talk through, and to implement, and to spin off into standards organizations, and test against each other, and kind of refine our implementation nationally, then we start to see homogenized efforts in terms of what is being deployed. And that really drives up reliability in what we can expect to see from a product being delivered, just to be direct about it.

Now, how can you all get in the mix, and how can we find things on the station locator, and how can you help drive this is you can tell us. So, if you see implementations that are off, if you see stations that are in the station locator and the AFDC, you can ping the National Renewable Energy Laboratory—or NREL—or us directly. You can always message the Joint Office. If you say, “Hey, I thought this, you know, federally funded station or” … Any—any high-powered station is supposed to be on the station locator. So, if one of them is missing, or you know of one that's not on there, or something's down or isn't working or seems to be an odd implementation, just let us know, and we will—we'll message you back. We'll go find it. Like, we will put engineers in the field on trying to figure out, “Why isn't the station showing up? Is it broken? What's going on?” Like, we're—we’re quite actually on it.

So, I'll let Eric answer about how things actually end up in the station locator, but if you ever see something amiss or missing, just message us directly, and we really will track it down.

ERIC WOOD: Yeah, Sarah put it really well. I'll just add that, yeah, it is a very challenging, data-centric problem to have this really large national network, and all the high-power stations, of course, but all of the publicly accessible level 2s as well are attempted to be tracked by the AFDC. So, what Sarah said is exactly right. If there are specific instances, please let us know. We have a lot of established relationships with some of the more mature charging networks out there to ingest data programmatically on a nightly basis, but some of the newer networks, we're still developing those relationships with. And yeah, happy to be flagged on individual stations by anyone that sees them in the field.

The other, kind of, small point that I'll make is that—one of the things that we're really excited about as an office is trying to grow some of the data sharing that happens between networks, including things like real-time pricing and availability. Those are data features that are required of federally funded stations. And in things that we're excited about and working towards trying to make more accessible across all of networks, not just those that are federally funded, as we see a lot of value to drivers in that kind-of information, help them make better decisions about when and where to charge.

STEPHEN LOMMELE: Thanks so much, Eric and Sarah. And thanks to all of our panelists, including Kevin, Debs, Linda, and Gabe. Really appreciate your time today.

I want to just flag that if there was anything of interest that came up today, we've got a lot of resources on driveelectric.gov. Numerous publications, access to data and tools, a lot of things that were talked about today. So, I definitely recommend browsing our resources section if you want to dig into anything that we talked about today.

And then, to wrap it up, thank you very much to all of our participants for joining us today. This webinar will be recorded and posted on driveelectric.gov, along with the slides, so if you visit driveelectric.gov and go to “Webinars”, you'll find this recording there within a week or so. And then, of course, sign up for the newsletter so you can hear about future webinar opportunities, events, other news coming out of the Joint Office. We do send that out about every two weeks.

And then, if you did have a question today that we weren't able to get to—Sarah and Eric talked about this, so did Linda—but we've got driveelectric.gov/contact, and you can submit a question there. We've got a team of experts behind the scenes that field those questions. I think Linda said that we've answered more than 7,000 questions since the Joint Office started. So, we're very active in getting back to folks with resources and answers to questions. And we definitely want to make sure you have the information that you need to make great decisions.

So, thank you all today for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you on a future webinar. Thanks, everyone.