Webinar: Reliability Strategies for Electric Vehicle Charging (Text Version)

This is a text version of Webinar: Reliability Strategies for Electric Vehicle Charging, presented on May 23, 2024.

Bridget Gilmore, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation (Joint Office): Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today. We will get started in just a few moments seeing people are still joining. Thanks so much for being here today.

All right. I will begin with some of our housekeeping items. So welcome to another wonderful Joint Office webinar. We're very glad to have you here. Today's topic will be diving into Reliability Strategies for EV Charging. We'll hear really wonderful updates from a great consortium of folks who are tackling these challenges, facing EV charging.

As a few reminders in terms of housekeeping, we are using Zoom. So we have a great function called the Q&A chat. You'll see it's two chat boxes that are talking with one another. So we hope that you will put your questions in that Q&A function. And that actually allows the panelists to respond to your questions directly and keep track of them as they come in. So we appreciate you using that throughout today's webinar.

As a disclaimer, this webinar is being recorded and will be posted on the drawing office website and used internally. So if you speak during the webinar or use your video, you are presumed to consent to recording and use of your voice or image. I will shortly turn it over to our wonderful chief technology officer, Alex Schroeder, who will provide a bit of an introduction on the Joint Office.

Then we'll hear some wonderful presentations from panelists. We'll have a nice panel discussion, as well as be sure to take as many questions from the audience as possible. So we appreciate you submitting those. So I will pass it off here for you, Alex.

Alex Schroeder, Joint Office: Wonderful. Thank you, Bridget. And thank you for all the work that you do. Bridget was sharing before we got on. I think she's close to 40 webinars. So seasoned veteran. I learned something from her every time I do one of these. But really delighted to have all of the attendees here today, as well as this esteemed group of panelists that I will introduce shortly.

My name is Alex Schroeder. I'm the Chief Technology Officer with the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. I have been with the office since its inception. I was the interim director for the first year. And I'm really excited to work closely with the wonderful team that we've established and built up over the last 2 and 1/2 years.

A little bit about the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. We are a little bit of an experiment in government. We are really the first cabinet-level Joint Office in the federal government. And I think really a recognition that with all of these generational investments being made by the federal government and the infrastructure bill, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act. We also need innovations in the institutions that move those efforts forward.

And so I think it's been an exciting time. We're learning a lot as we go. But we wanted to be very clear when we stood up the office with what are we focused on. What is our mission? What is our vision? I think very succinctly, we are laser-focused on a future where everyone can ride and drive electric. Today's topic is a really important element of that vision. And it's ensuring that we have a charging network that really does speak to the user and brings out the benefits of electrification. Next slide, please.

So the Joint Office, as I mentioned, was established in the Infrastructure Bill in 2021. Close to $18 billion in federal funding programs were included in that legislation. And billions more in the Inflation Reduction Act. We provide technical assistance, unifying guidance, and analysis to support a number of programs.

We work very closely with the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, obviously. But also the Environmental Protection Agency. The marquee efforts that we support are on this slide. The NEVI Program, National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program is a formula program. This is $5 billion going to states to build out first a network along highway corridors.

And then as they build out those corridors, they will be moving into communities and off corridors. There is a discretionary grant program that's $2.5 billion. About $625 million of that has been awarded to date to build out infrastructure in communities, as well as corridors. It's also building infrastructure for hydrogen, natural gas, and propane.

And then I think two exciting programs, one in the Federal Transit Administration to support low and no-emission buses. I can say in the first year and a half of that program, we have more than doubled the fleet of electric buses on our streets today in the country. So exciting impact there. And then I think probably near and dear to all of us, it is providing clean transportation options for school kids through the Clean School Bus Program that's administered by the EPA. Next slide, please.

So technical assistance is really the bread and butter of the Joint Office. We bring together experts from across government, as well as the national labs to help states, cities, school districts, et cetera be successful with these programs. For many folks, this is a new program. It's a new skill set. They're working with new stakeholders.

And we are really there to be their partners and work hand in glove with them to help them be successful.

Driveelectric.gov is really our central point of contact where you can access that technical assistance. We have a concierge service that's fielded over 6,000 requests since the office was started. And we've got a team of over 50 that is just waiting to help you all be successful and the stakeholders in the space with implementing these important initiatives. Next slide, please.

There are a number of resources to call your attention to that are on driveelectric.gov. We have a rural and urban EV toolkit, which is really geared towards providing solutions, and frameworks, and resources to entities that are really thinking about charging in the urban and rural context, as well as the overlap of the two. A couple of key publications that the Joint Office has put out in the last year or two.

A 2030 study that was released last year that shows that we need approximately 1.2 million public chargers to support the anticipated EV-charging fleet in 2030. I'm happy to report that we have just seen incredible growth in the charging network, particularly over the last couple of years. I think it's about 90% network growth in the last 2 and 1/2 years.

We also summarizing the progress of federal efforts. So what we call the NEVI formula program annual report is really a highlight of the efforts that the states are taking to help to build out the national charging network. So we'd encourage you all to take a look at our website if any of those are of interest. These are, I will say, also internally very important to discussions that we are having in guiding federal investments. Next slide, please.

Don't need to say much here. This is really how you get a hold of us. There's a contact us form. Please reach out to us if you have any questions. As I said, we've got a very capable team that's fielding this. Next slide, please.

We are going to do, we'll call these icebreakers polling questions. I'm going to have to turn over to the amazing technical team here to really queue these up. But we just want to get a sense of who we have on the line here from parts of the country, as well as types of stakeholders. So you should see a pop-up box. I am told in that pop-up box that I can't vote. So we hope to hear from all of you.

All right. Do we want to move to the next polling question here? Good representation. I see the northeast, as well as the west. A couple of folks internationally. Exciting.

All right. And then one more question on, what sector are you from? Who are we talking to? Is this government private sector, utility, EV industry? Let us know who you are, not who you are, who you're representing today.

All right. And the answer is about half government. A little less than half industry. And then 15% other. So good mix there.

All right. So let's jump into the content esteem set of panelists here. We're going to hear from Jacob Matthews with the Joint Office, John Smart with Idaho National Lab and the Director of the ChargeX Consortium, Frank Marotta at General Motors, Ken Tennyson with Electrify America, and Cuong Nguyen with ABB E-Mobility.

I think I'm going to start with Jacob Matthews here. And I guess before we dive in, a little bit of a personal anecdote on the Charging Experience Consortium. And I want to give a shout-out to John Smart, who is really the architect of this program. We worked very closely with John before this consortium was chartered by the Joint Office, really with an emphasis on having impact.

I want to give him a lot of credit for having the vision to really correlate the customer experience with technical achievement. I think really the link between those two is where this group adds a ton of value. These are very technical topics and issues. But having that customer-centric approach really does shortcut the opportunity for the technology to get to the market. So we'll have a chance later again to shoot John to toot John's horn. But I wanted to do so before we got started.

I think my next job is actually to toot Jacob Matthews' horn. Jacob is a Senior Advisor in the Joint Office for Standards and Reliability. Jacob has been with us, I think, a little over a year. Jacob, you'll have to correct me here. But in his role in the Joint Office, he provides technical and policy advice on charging standards, as well as reliability.

Jacob comes to us from an automaker over 30 years with Ford. So really part all-star cast that we are privileged to have in the Joint Office. So, Jacob, I will turn it over to you to provide an overview of what the Joint Office is doing on reliability, as well as the customer experience.

Jacob Matthews, Standards & Reliability, Joint Office: Thank you, Alex. And thanks for your generous words. So, again, my name is Jacob Matthews. As Alex mentioned, Senior Advisor for Standards and Reliability. I hope to provide you a brief overview today of what the work that standards and reliability is doing. We're one of the pillars in the Joint Office for different areas. But one of the areas that Joint Office focuses on is standards and reliability. So let's go to the next slide, please.

So one of the things I want to point out is that we have, at its core, reliability of the charging ecosystem is foundational. And we believe that's foundational to achieving positive EV-charging experience. And we have a continuous improvement approach to tackling the challenges of building a reliable and convenient national charging network. Starting with the understanding of what the customer wants and needs are, and then measuring to how the current ecosystem is performing to those customer wants and needs and analyzing where the system has shortfalls and where gaps are needed to be filled.

And then, again, measuring our performance to that, to seeing how actions are actually helping to improve customer performance bring this back full circle. So this is our, our, our wheel of continuous improvement in helping to ensure reliable charging experience. So the next slide, please.

So, here, I'm simply overlaying some of the activities that we are engaged in starting from the top right. We've assisted the federal highways in developing the minimum standards and to ensure that certain performance standards are included, such as the reliability metric to ensure that positive charging experience. Also, we have developed various ecosystem maps. And I'll share some of these with you in subsequent slides. But that is really to help us visualize and to pinpoint where deficiencies might exist.

And also for this purpose, the ChargeX Consortium, as Alex just alluded to. And I won't get into too much detail with that because John and our esteemed colleagues will talk about that. But a lot of the work that will help to improve the reliability is also taking place within But then there are other activities that are focused on. For example, to assist with solutions for the industry, we've developed open-source architecture and open-source deployments of various software. And I'll touch upon that here in a bit. We've also taken on various cybersecurity projects. ChargeX, again, we'll talk about that.

And then also we have funded projects to scale up testing by labs and also to validating charger performance. All these are key important elements that will ultimately lead to an improved reliability of the system. And we'll briefly describe that as we go on.

So the charging minimum standards in this slide, you can see it's very simply charging has to be predictable and reliable. It needs to be working for drivers when they need to use them. Drivers be able to easily find the chargers. And they should not be having to use multiple apps and accounts to pay for charging. And the chargers that we deploy need to be able to support drivers' needs well into the future. And that's the minimum requirement, that standard that we all call it as NEVI.

Also, included in that on the next slide is the reliability metric, which at its core embeds a 97% uptime for the charging port. And the charger is considered up when it's both online delivering the minimum required power as a vehicle demands it. Simple requirement. But again, what we believe is key to achieving a positive consumer charging experience. And it's a hard metric to get to given where we're at. But that's our benchmark. That's where we want to be to be able to demonstrate and have that reliable experience for the consumer to change over into an EV, into an electrified vehicle.

Here is an ecosystem map. I mentioned earlier, and I'll show you a few maps in this particular presentation. Won’t get too much into it. But this is just another high-level map showing the various connections between the various actors in the ecosystem. And so, for example, just highlighting, there's an opportunity, for example, we discovered to improve authorization and payment processes, communication of contract information, et cetera. It's not as seamless as it needs to be. But that's where we're jumping in to help with that to drive for a more reliable network and user experience.

And the next slide is another ecosystem map. And this is somewhat high level. But yet it's documenting trade-offs and implementation notes from the field that aim to capture common considerations and opportunities for harmonization.

So, for instance, you'll notice that the AC charging is slightly different. Connection, communication method when compared to DC charging. But this goes back to our continuous improvement circle. The challenges that the customers might face and how do we avoid those particular challenges and provide solutions. So having a very deep level understanding of all the connection points will help us– and then be able to find solutions for where there are issues is what our aim is.

Let's go to the next slide. And this is another ecosystem map. This time, we're focusing on the protocols that NEVI calls for and the minimum requirements and to alleviate the pain point of multiple different interpretations and implementation of the same standard. So we've called for OCPP 2.0 or ISO 15118.

But clearly, implementation of that standard by various entities is going to be different. And to prevent and to help streamline, what we have done is provide an open-source reference architecture, which was funded by the Department of Energy. And the hope here is that industry can utilize that open reference architecture to either implement that directly into their control modules or they can use that to compare and test against this open architecture to help further improve their own implementation.

Let's go to the next slide. I'll touch upon a bit of the work that we're doing. And this is work in progress. But nonetheless, wanted to just share with you because we're deep-diving into the architecture and then the ecosystem map and seeing where all the pain points are. So in this particular diagram, we're basically highlighting all the different connections that exist between various actors.

So you can see, for example, between EV and charger, there is a connection. There's also a connection between the grid and back to the customer charging software or perhaps even the customer's app. And so all these different connections can lead to they need to be seamless, but they can lead to miscommunication or not sufficient translation. Or it could be areas where that can lead to a breakdown. That can, of course, lead to a poor customer experience.

So, again, what I've highlighted here is areas that we feel are requiring additional testing. So once we know what areas have gaps, then how do we go about verifying and improving that interaction between those particular points in this ecosystem? Let's go to the next slide.

And here is a bit more on the same map. But now, looking from the lens of reliability and safety standards. So the question being asked here is, each of these entities, what safety testing is being done or will be performed, and what data will be available that will give us the confidence that that particular device, or that particular entity, or that particular connection is robust from a safety perspective? And that, of course, leads to high reliability.

So, for instance, there are several standards that we have listed. Is the connection between the EV and EVSE fully tested to a UL standard? Is a UL standard complete in its design and in its testing? So these are all the questions we're getting into to make sure that we have good connection. And we have high reliability between all these different points of failures.

For the next slide, and this is again a similar map, but now looking at it from a communication conformance and interoperability testing point of view. And again, you can see that there are tests that the vehicle even perhaps will do in their sphere. There's a test that might be done by the charger in their particular sphere, if you will.

But then is that a common standard? Is there a communication of success of that particular test? So what kind of conformance or interoperability testing needs to be done to ensure that what parties might test individually when put together in the ecosystem, they actually do perform equally well? So lots of different areas of connection.

And this is just a high-level look. And we can really deep dive into every single one of these points. But at this point, I just want to point out that our focus is to look into all these different areas, and find where there may be issues, and then try to provide a solution for that.

Cybersecurity is another area. So let's go to this. So the EVCI, as you see there is a critical infrastructure. And it is essentially transacting on financial. It's on personal identifiable information. It's a source of power flow.

And so there are lots of multiple points that need to be ensured that they're safe from cyber intrusion such as there could be organized crime for financial, there could be tracking by foreign intelligence. And so having classified this as a critical infrastructure, our focus has been in four areas or at least three areas of guiding, analyzing, and coordinating. And this is activities with industries, and participants, and states.

And some of our work includes– and we'll talk about that, is basically providing some procurement language and guidance. And we will discuss more about it. But our focus has been to basically be the convener for bringing industry together and helping to resolve cyber security concerns that might show up in the future. Let's go to the next slide.

The technology development plan or the roadmap. Generally, the government is facing is looking at early technology deployment versus– and where we're focusing actually is in technology readiness level 7 and 8, which essentially means it's almost ready for deployment. And so our activity and our goal is to fully engage with the industry and help to bring technologies into market as quickly as possible and to bridge that gap. And so even in our cybersecurity, we're focused in those activities that can help progress needle very, very quickly. Let's go to the next map.

Backside here is basically some high-level views of our cyber activities. So, basically, we're providing some contracting procurement language for NEVI grants. We're providing a framework for incident reporting. We're coordinating with various ecosystem security working groups. This is the CIPAC which stands for Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council.

And so as a government body, we're able to convene and get feedback from industry working groups to be able to form the right tasks and actions to help with making sure our network is completely secure. We're also looking at NEVI privacy requirements framework and providing guidance on that. Next slide.

The other things we have recently developed is this professional development tool. We're applying a nice cybersecurity force framework. Essentially is a national institute of cybersecurity education. And here we're working to help develop training modules and hands-on training for having the next level of skill set in place to help combat cyber issues that might arise in and might affect our national charging network. So that's something we're getting ahead of that.

We're also providing a cybersecurity assessment tool. This is using findings from the field to test and develop security test protocols. And we're integrating open-source security tools for developing EVSE reference architecture and then professional development as well.

And then we're also working with the industry to help develop this vulnerability research and mitigation. We're empowering the industry to interface with security research community. And potentially, we'll have a bug bounty program here with some prizes. That's a thing we're investigating, again, to get people engaged in helping to shore up and have a very secure network. Next one.

So one thing I mentioned earlier about increasing commercial capacity. We had a funding opportunity. And now, we have actually released some funds, five projects across five different states. And we're spending about 13.5 million in federal cost share.

And essentially for two big items, one is to build up testing capacity and for certification for high-power chargers. As I mentioned earlier in one of the slides, there are gaps in testing, and that we need to make sure all the interfaces are being addressed. This will help us do that. Essentially setting up labs that can do round-robin testing with various EVSE's, various OEMs, and ensure the interoperability between those.

And then 3b is validating the high-power charger performance. And this is where we'll be actually assessing the NEVI devices or chargers that have been deployed to ensure that they are performing to the required standards. And this is not to be punitive, but to actually understand what issues might exist. And so then going back to our continuous improvement circle help us inform on what other actions need to be taken such that we can improve further. So this is helping to gather that data of the network as it's getting deployed.

All right. So I think with that, we'll like to introduce or pass it to John Smart. John is the director who's leading ChargeX Consortium. And so over to you, John.

John Smart, INL: Thanks, Jacob. Now that you've heard the entire breadth of the Joint Office Standards and Reliability Program, we'd like to spend the rest of our time in presentation focusing in on just one aspect of that program, which is, as mentioned, the ChargeX Consortium. The full name is the National Charging Experience Consortium.

And as Alex mentioned at the outset, our main motivation is to ensure that the voice of the customer, the EV driver who is using public charging infrastructure is represented in all of the technical work that the Joint Office is sponsoring to improve the reliability and usability of the national charging network. Next slide.

The vision of the consortium is that any driver of any EV can charge on any charger and have it work the first time every time. We're doing this by bringing together national laboratories. There are three involved. Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho, and National Renewable Energy Lab in Denver.

Along with industry EV charging industry members, including automakers, charging station operators, charging network providers, charger manufacturers, field service providers, and a host of other stakeholders, we've also included consumer advocates, some academia, and even state government agencies. Our goal is to measure and improve the reliability and usability of public charging infrastructure in North America.

And significantly move the needle by June of 2025. We started in June of 2023. So we're a year in. And we're happy today to give you an update after our first of two years. The focus of the consortium is on complex issues that require multiple stakeholders to solve and to simplify or set another way. We're focused on the problems that no single company can solve on their own. Next, please.

Early in our work, we did comprehensive interviewing and surveying to understand the biggest issues that are plaguing the customer experience today or affecting the customer experience negatively with public charging infrastructure in North America. And based on those results, we prioritized where our consortium can have the biggest impact.

We have broken our work out into three working groups to address those key areas. First working group is called defining the Charging Experience. Jacob talked about uptime. And that's very important to measure and improve the uptime of public charging. But that's not sufficient to truly understand the customer experience. We need more metrics or key performance indicators that are used and measured uniformly across the industry. So everyone's speaking the same language so that we're properly measuring, and therefore, improving the customer experience.

Working group 2 is called the reliability and usability triage. As the name suggests, that working group is focused on really understanding and fixing the root causes of problems in several key areas. First, payment and user interface. Second, communication primarily between the EV and the EVSE or the charger and also between the charger and the cloud. And then finally hardware.

Third, we don't want to just focus on today's problems. We also want to understand what is needed to allow the industry to scale. And specifically, as more makes and models of chargers or EVSE come to market and more makes and models of electric vehicles, how do we ensure that they all work together going forward?

We've identified two key areas to help in this respect. First is diagnostics and improving the state of the art for generating and sharing diagnostic data between stakeholders and the ecosystem. And second, improving interoperability testing methods to efficiently verify that every charger works with every vehicle.

The outcome of the work of the national laboratories involved is primarily written work products, reports. We create new knowledge and share that with industry. And in one of our projects, we're also developing prototype tools. Ultimately, though, it falls to industry to adopt the recommended practices, to embrace the knowledge created, and put into practice, to adopt new practices to improve the customer experience. Next slide, please.

Now, we'll go into the work of each of the three working groups, starting with Working Group 1. I'm pleased to introduce Frank Marotta from General Motors, who's the industry co-chair of this working group. I'd also like to recognize Casey Quinn from Intel, who's the National Lab Co-chair. And so take it away, Frank.

Frank Marotta, General Motors/ChargeX: Thank you, John. Thanks so much for your leadership here within the ChargeX Consortium. Good morning. I guess good afternoon and good evening to all. We have people joining from across the globe, which is great to see. It's really great to be with you here today. And I just want to first say that it has been a privilege to be acting as the co-chair, the industry co-chair for working group 1, alongside Casey Quinn, representing the other half of the co-chair equation from the National Labs.

And I want to just express my sincere thanks to all of the participants of working group 1, without whom we would certainly not be where we are today. And I very much appreciate everyone's support going forward. Still plenty of work to do here. So defining the customer experience or the charging experience really begins at the moment the driver has the intention to go out and complete a charging session.

And so, basically, that begins with finding a charger, accessing that charger, starting your charge, the steps that are required along the way there. And then successful completion of that charge and all the while feeling safe and comfortable along the way and getting help as needed.

And, of course, on this whole customer journey, there can be many pain points along the way. And that is where our task is to identify what those pain points are and figure out how we as an industry can work together to resolve them through some definitions of KPIs that can help us measure how each of these elements are performing along the way. Some examples of pain points that we've have come up for discussion were inaccurate charging, station locations, and any mapping tools.

Long time waiting in queues in some circumstances. Can't start starting a charging session. Whether it's a particular form of payment is not accepted or broken equipment. Charging sessions taking longer than expected because the charge power that was being delivered was lower than expected.

And even in things like charging stations that lack amenities or where certain networks make it a little bit more challenging to get help than other networks. All of these were in our crosshairs to try and address. And, of course, addressing all of them that relatively short time that the ChargeX Consortium has in which to do so is impossible. However, through a lot of conversation and some debate, we arrived at some KPIs that I'm going to talk about here today. So next slide, please.

So we realized quickly again, given the scope of what we're trying to cover, that we had to do some ranking activity. And through that customer pain point ranking activity, we arrived at an interim set of KPIs. And then for near-term implementation, and then a longer set, a longer-term set of KPIs that were some different ones, but also some continued enhancement and improvement upon of some of the interim KPIs.

So those interim KPIs are really focused on addressing pain points that using data that might already be available or is easily accessible with some industry collaboration. That could be implemented most quickly without too much additional deliberation or effort. That initial set of interim KPIs, along with the longer-term KPIs will be collected together and published here in the coming weeks. Actually, early June is when we're targeting the release of that first publication. And then we will continue to work through the ideal set of KPIs the rest of this calendar year with publications describing those in more detail arriving early next year. Next slide.

Sorry. We think you jumped two slides ahead, did you? Yeah. OK. So talk about this interim set of KPIs. So focusing on the accessing a charger piece. We have waiting probability, which is basically the probability that at least one port might be available to deliver energy when the EV arrives.

And under starting a charge, we have two KPIs. We have one that is meant to measure the effort required to actually start the charging session and then the charge start time would be the time required to actually get that session initiated. And then in the completing a charge bucket, what we call charge end success. That would be capturing the effort required to actually complete that charge, meaning no errors or struggling with coupler disconnection, and those sorts of things.

And by the way, the more detailed, this is a high-level overview of the definition of these KPIs. Obviously, the published documents will go into much more depth as to the equations that were contemplating to use to measure these in more detail on the definitions. So moving on to the next slide. Yeah, we'll get into some of the longer-term KPIs.

So, here, we aim to try to address the location accuracy piece. So how effective are the mapping tools that drivers could be using to locate the station? How effective are they at actually getting the vehicle right up to the plug? Wait time. So the probability of having to wait is one thing.

And then wait time. The time required to actually access a functional available charger is another one. And then we get into some other KPIs that start to pull together or aggregate some of the interim KPIs to paint a more complete picture.

And those would be extended charge time is a new one that one would, would basically be the additional time that a driver may have to wait beyond what they might have anticipated due to maybe less power being delivered than expected. And session success. Session success, as you can see, goes across, encompasses both charging, start success, and charge-end success. There's a nuance there between session success and visit success, which I won't get into just for time purposes. But those are both encompassing some of the effort and time required to actually initiate and complete a session successfully.

And then, of course, first-time session success is something that we care about very deeply. We don't want to see drivers out there struggling and making multiple attempts if we can avoid it to get there charging session initiated. Yeah, Next slide.

So with that, we're moving into the rest of this year. So coming up here very soon, we will be delivering the report with those KPIs, the definitions here in early June. That will include an implementation guide which did not mention as to how to best implement some of the KPIs that we've defined in the interim set. And that will be published later this fall.

Working group 1 will use data from chargers in the field to verify the implementation guide. So that's where that OCPP piece comes in. And working groups 2 and 3 will be engaged for support for some of the data needed to collect and calculate the ideal KPIs.

So that's what we've done thus far and what the look ahead looks like. I think with that, we're going to transition here to Ken Tennyson from Electrify America. He's the Industry Co-chair for Working Group 2. And he's going to talk about all the great work being done in the reliability and usability triage space. So take it away, Ken.

Ken Tennyson, Electrify America: Thanks, Frank. Greetings, everyone. Good afternoon. Or whatever time of the day it is where you are in the world, it's a privilege to be here today and speak to you all today about Working Group 2 which I have the privilege to be the industry co-chair, along with the National Lab Co-chair Kristi Moriarty. And this working group has focused on reliability and usability. And really our key focus has been on recommending key technical solutions. And we'll dive into what some of those are. Next slide.

We formed three task forces to really focus on some key areas based on the initial recommendations by the consortium participants. And the first task force was, as John mentioned, was on payment and user interface. And payment system reliability is a key driver of customer experience. And the failure to process payments successfully can be a contributing cause of public EV charging session failures.

And so the consortium working group developed a best practice report which is now available. You can see it linked on the far right. That documents some of the key problems and also solutions for wide range of payment issues.

One thing to clarify around payment, I think, oftentimes, it's focused very narrowly on the point-of-sale device that's at the charging system, terminal, or kiosk. But in fact, there's a number of factors in that full ecosystem that Jacob was elaborating on earlier that have to work successfully to enable payment. And one of those factors is around network connectivity, which is very essential to initiating a payment and starting a charge session.

And some of the factors that are discussed in this best practice paper focus around addressing site signal strength, whether that's cellular, or local Wi-Fi connection, looking in some cases as a best practice at wired solutions where that's feasible, working with a site host. And then also looking at ways to enable the use of a smartphone app using a local Wi-Fi hotspot. And all of this very specifically has to address, of course, those key elements of data security. So network connectivity is one area that's thoroughly addressed in the best practice paper.

The next one is, of course, the credit card readers themselves. EV charging, of course, it's an outdoor environment. They have to be ruggedized and they have to be integrated with the EV charging system in a way that provides high uptime, high reliability on the hardware, the firmware layers interoperability across the entire EV charging ecosystem. And so this is a key focus area. And there's a number of more specific recommendations, again, if you reference the best practice paper.

And then, finally, the user interface is really key to helping that customer navigate a seamless charging experience with very clear instructions and helping them understand each step of the way what needs to happen. And so there's very specific recommendations and best practices that are captured, as well as you can see, reference the payments form recommendation around consistent customer experience. Next slide.

The second task force was formed around communications, as John mentioned, both vehicle to charger and charger to a back-end or the cloud. And this task force, again, we were really looking for concrete and specific solutions that could be recommended and actioned across the industry and really focused around increasing charge start success with what's called seamless retry.

And quite simply put, sometimes a driver will have to unplug and replug in if a problem occurs during a session start-up. A seamless retry is making that happen in a transparent way to the driver in the background and recreating unplug and replug event without the driver having to take any action. And this is accomplished by doing in the background a reset of all of the state variables and timers associated with that initial charge plug-in, and replicating an unplug and replug event. And this has a whole lot of promise in improving that first-time plug-in success.

An initial best practice document has been authored by this task force and has received industry feedback. And Electrify America has recently completed a demo of this feature in our center of excellence. And for next steps, we'll be continuing within the working group 2 to demonstrate this with other industry partners and evaluate specific specifications for the technique. And then, of course, publish a final version of the seamless retry document. Next slide.

The final task force under working group 2 is focused on hardware. And what emerged as a critical priority for the hardware task force was the topic of adapters. Adapters are coming to the market. We know very quickly with the opening up of networks with multiple charge standards both CCS1, the North American Charging Standard. The supercharger network opening up to non-Tesla vehicles. So there's a lot of momentum around adapter usage between multiple types of EV charging interfaces.

And, unfortunately, the arrival of adapters on the market has preceded the arrival of the appropriate safety standards that would guide and drive certification of these adapter devices. So, today, there are adapters available on the market that do not meet any type of industry-standard around safety. And so as such, this is a key priority for working group 2 to address these key risks, which you can see addressed above and ensuring that adapters entering the market.

No different than any electronic device that you might buy. Often, you'll see UL stamp, a certification stamp, or an other safety standards that are marked on that device. And that gives you confidence that device meets those industry requirements around safety. We need to get there very, very quickly with adapters.

There is a number of ways that is being accomplished through working group 2 giving input directly into the performance standard around the North American charge standard J3400, as well as of course, the UL standard 2252, which is in draft form today.

The progress here was really to focus on building a technical library of potential failure modes for adapters. And this was done through a working group, including physically at the National Lab. We came together and identified 140 unique failure modes for the adapters that were part of this study. And including 18 specific recommendations. And these will now be coupled with additional study at the National Lab on vehicle inlet samples looking at thermal performance when coupled with these different adapter types.

And so, ultimately, the outcome of this will be to complete those recommended actions with the industry partners for high-priority failure modes. Of course, the recommendations continue to be made to those standards organizations. And then there will be ongoing failure testing to further refine our failure modes and effects analysis. Next slide.

All right. That's it for working group 2. And again, it's been a real privilege to be part of this consortium effort. I'm going to turn it over to Cuong Nguyen from ABB who's leading working group 3.

Thank you, Ken. Like Ken mentioned, I am the Industry Co-chair for Working Group 3, along with Dan Dobrzynski from Argonne National Lab, who is the National Lab co-chair. So working group 3 is focusing on solutions for scaling reliability.

We have three work streams that I'll cover in more detail. The working group had two task force, a diagnostic task force and a testing task force. So the first work stream is focused on improving charging system diagnostics. That is under the diagnostic task force.

The diagnostic task force is being led by Benny Varghese from Idaho National Lab. So the main challenge that we're trying to solve here is the lack of common error code and diagnostic data sharing across the industry. So with that, we want to develop a set of minimum required error code or MREC and a minimum required diagnostic information or MRDI for our industry to use and to ensure that we can share them in a uniform manner.

So we have made pretty good progress with this. The initial set of minimum required error codes (MREC) have been published. And you can see them on the right. So we have published that MREC along with an implementation guide on the ChargeX website. So this will allow industry to actually implement adopt them so that we can actually use to communicate the error more effectively and more uniformly.

So the initial setup MREC are more charger EVSE-focused. And we have completed a preliminary demonstration of MREC at an industry event. So we are working with partners to actually have more implementation and then to prepare more demonstration of MREC.

Additionally, the Open Charge Alliance, OCA, which is the Alliance that is responsible for the Open Charge Point Protocol, OCPP. They consider to include MREC in OCPP. So that work is ongoing. Additionally, the average open-source software platform efforts, if you don't know, is an open-source project that is under the Linux Foundation. So they are developing different software components for the EV charging ecosystem, including EV, EVSE, and the back-end.

So the idea is that you can actually use these open-source software packages to simulate a charge session, so that way you can actually do the implementation without actually having to have the hardware in place. So with that project, MREC is included in their software base for OCPP 2.0.1.

So with that, our next step is to collaborate with CharIN and the EV roaming foundation to address the more EV specific like I mentioned previously, the current MRECs are more EVSE specific. So we want to cover the EV as well. And then roaming is a big issue especially for payment and such that you heard from Ken. So I think some of that, we wanted to capture as well as in the error code.

And then next we do want to develop the MRDI, which is the diagnostic information. We want to create a data structure, so that industry can use. But we are not going to specify how it has to be shared. Because once you have the data, the sharing part is the more difficult. So we want to enable the structure first, and then address the sharing later. Next slide, please.

So the next workstream is on interoperability testing, which is under the testing task force. The testing task force is being led by Sam Thurston from Argonne National Lab. Interoperability testing is really important for reliability, because we want to enable the communication between EV and EVSE.

For this work, we only focus on EVSE and not to the back-end because we want to actually do the immediate one and not have to deal with the back end yet. So the goal of this work is to create uniform test cases so that when you have a testing event or when you have one-on-one testing with OEM, you can actually have a basic test set that you can use to provide uniform and testing and also to have uniform result that you actually can compare.

So we have also made good progress with this. We have developed nine test cases thus far. And they cover both DIN 70121 communication and also a ISO 50118. The focus is on [? blocking ?] chart because think that's the next piece that we want to have more adoption. And actually, that also helps with the user experience as well. So I think that's a big focus that we have for the test cases.

So we have completed a test plan that can be used as an optional test program at the next CharIN Festival that's going to be held in June 2024 in Cleveland. So the participant there can use this prescribed test plan if they choose to and conduct the test. So with that, we do want to capture some of the result and learning from that so it would actually help us refine our test cases.

And based on the feedback of the participant from the test case. And our ultimate goal is to actually publish the full test set of test cases based on the different learning from the festival and the participant so that we can actually make the full test suite available for industry to use. Next, please.

So the final work stream is also under the testing task force, which is focusing on developing a remote test harness. So for testing in a laboratory testing environment, you are kind of limited to what device and equipment that you have available at the lab or whatever devices or equipment that you can bring in to the lab. So the challenge with that is that it limits your opportunity to actually conduct more testing.

So we want to develop this remote test harness to actually bridge that gap by providing remote access availability– remote access for the different devices that you can actually test– so that you can test devices at different locations. So you don't have to be physically located in the same location to actually test. So this would actually broaden your testing ability within your lab and actually open up a lot of possibility.

So with that, the national lab team developed a first of a kind testing harness. And you can view this as a gateway, right, to actually bridge the communication between the EV and EVSE through a broker on the cloud. So the communication protocol that being used for this work is MQTT, which stands for Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol. Sorry, it's a mouthful, but it is an oasis standard for IO– it's geared toward IoT communication.

IoT is Internet Of Things devices. So with that, it is a publish and subscribe message protocol. So that way, you can view that– the EV and EVSE can actually subscribe to written messages and exchanges so that you can actually run to a different test sequences that you would do if you actually have the hardware.

So the progress today is that the team had test the feasibility for the MQTT latency to actually make sure that we can support the sequences of the charging, so make sure you don't time out as long as you actually are communicating. And the additional work has been done to develop the hardware and software interfaces to make it functional.

So for the next step for this work, they are building the EV and EVSE interface for hardware and software to make sure that you can communicate and also to do a proof of concept demonstration around DIN 70121. So DIN was selected, I believe, because it is a lighter protocol, and it doesn't require TLS, which is Transport Layer Security. So it's actually a little easier to test than ISO 50118.

The team is recruiting industry champions for testing the viability of the product. So think we do need all the help that we can get from the industry. And I want to close by thanking all of the participants in working group three. We couldn't have done this work without the industry participants. And I'm going to turn it over back to John Smart to provide some closing remarks. John?

John Smart: Thanks, Cuong. Next slide, please. So I mentioned, we're coming up on our first anniversary, and we've learned quite a bit. One of the key themes is the complexity of this industry or of the EV charging ecosystem has– is clear. And you saw that in Jacob's slides up front.

However, we're more convinced than ever that the problems that sour the charging experience are in fact solvable. However, many of them cannot be solved by any single company, which emphasizes, again, the purpose of the consortium to enable or bring– enable collaboration and bring industry together to address issues in the three areas that we've discussed, defining the charging experience with common KPIs, so everyone is speaking the same language.

You may have heard the old adage, you can't improve what you can't measure. And that's what we're addressing in working group one. Also solving issues in hardware and software in working group two, you may have noticed from Ken's comments that the problems that we're addressing have to do with complex interfaces.

Oftentimes, it's the communication or the interface between two different– two different components or two different sets of software, where the challenges lie that require intense collaboration, and finally creating solutions to scale reliability and interoperability, as Cuong talked about, are– there is where collaboration is needed, and we're seeing a lot of rapid improvement.

Another big thing that we've learned is that success is in the implementation. This shouldn't come as a surprise, but recommended practice reports sitting on the shelf don't do industry any good. It's a little bit– what we've learned goes beyond that, though.

And it has to do with how change ripples across industry. We've realized that publishing a report or writing a recommended practice, identifying solutions, and documenting the problems and how to overcome them are just the first step. The second step is to implement on a very small scale that solution demonstrated at the task force level to verify that the solution does in fact fix the problem, then push the that solution to members of the working group for their broader implementation, again, to verify, validate, and to socialize– and then ultimately, to socialize the solutions for broad industry adoption. Next slide, please.

We can get there as an industry. We can get to the point where any driver of any EV can charge on any charger the first time every time. There's still a ton of work to do. We're pleased to be working together to realize this vision. So for more information, including all of the reports that we've published so far, as well as forthcoming reports, please visit the ChargeX website.

Alex Schroeder: All right. Thank you, John. Thank you, Jacob. Thank you, Frank. Thank you, Ken. Thank you, Cuong. And thank you to all of their co-chairs as well. I think John is at 80 plus members of the ChargeX consortium. And happy almost birthday.

That's exciting that coming up on a year. Hopefully, you guys are going to do something and celebrate. So a lot of really exciting work there. And I think, again, kind of coming back, John, I like how you ended with the vision as well, bringing the group back to what we're ultimately trying to accomplish and translating something that the driver and consumer experiences firsthand with all of the deep technical work that this team is collaborating on.

So kudos again to you and the rest of the team for truly kind of living up to the calling and the vision from a year ago. So this is the, I would say, interactive part of the discussion. Maybe ask if the speakers are willing to come back on camera.

We're going to have a little bit of a panel discussion and open it up to the audience for Q&A. Moderators prerogative, I think. I get to start us off with a couple of questions that I have, that I'd be curious to hear from you all on. And maybe starting with our task force co-chairs.

I think John and Jacob shared their motivations for the National Charging Experience Consortium. But Ken, Frank, Cuong, could you maybe describe why your organization decided to join the charging experience consortium and how the work of the consortium really aligns with what your respective company is trying to accomplish? And Ken, maybe we can start with you.

Ken Tennyson: Yeah, absolutely, Alex. Thank you. We were very enthusiastic to join ChargeX because as John really nailed it, that a lot of the challenges in the EV charging ecosystem are overcome by working horizontally with a number of key players and really driving industry level changes that even exceed the base standards and requirements.

And we know, I think having been doing this for over six years now, that customer experience and reliability is a top driver of EV adoption. And so by coordinating across the industry, it's a powerful tool to work together to address all of those key enablers of adoption. We're still in a growth trajectory, and we really want to join together with other key industry partners and public partners to leverage our collective experience.

ALEX SCHROEDER: Thanks, Ken. And I want to turn to Frank in just a second, but also encourage the audience. Please ask any questions that you have in the chat, and we will try to work through as many of those as we can before we get to the top of the hour. Frank, maybe ask you the same question. Why– what brings you here today with us and over the last year with ChargeX?

Frank Marotta: Yeah, well– so Ken actually touched on it. I work for an automaker, and we care deeply about EV adoption. GM has not been shy about our intention to electrify the fleet. And we are not alone.

You're seeing every– every automaker seems like has a new EV model that's hitting the roads. And so charging network reliability is really a key piece of that. It's part of the decision making process. The more bad stories folks hear about their charging experience, the less charging experience, the less likely they are to be considering an EV as their next vehicle.

So it comes down to EV adoption as the core reason why we're interested. And it was good timing too. Another colleague of mine at GM and I co-coauthored a white paper that had a bunch of KPIs in it that served as a starting point for some of the discussions in working group one. And so, yeah, the timing was right, for sure, as well. Cuong, anything to add here?

Cuong Nguyen, ABB: Yes, I think, Alex, it is good to go last because Ken and Frank kind of covered a lot of the points. But I think kind of taking it back to what John said, right. These are problems that not one company can solve alone.

But I think having the consortium there is really helpful. And then we manufacture at EV mobility, we manufacture EVSE. So we're only one component, right. If you look back at Jacob ecosystem, right, we're one component.

So we have to work with all of these other components. And I think having a group coming together to solve pain point and drop early issue is actually going to go a long way toward easing the– improving the consumer experience and actually speed up adoption. I think that's all we care about, right.

Alex Schroeder: Awesome. So I'm hearing a common thread. I mean, these are some of the largest players, I would say, in the industry. And I think what I heard universally from all three of you is you can do this on your own. And so I think it's a powerful– I can appreciate collaboration takes a bit more time, but you can really get some leveraged outcomes.

So awesome to validate, I think, the thesis of the consortium here. So I'm going to bring John and Jacob back in and maybe open this up to the whole panel. So we've seen automakers in particular rapidly converge towards J3400 as the connector standard for EVs, and future models, and through existing models with adapters.

So I'm just curious how you see this impacting reliability and the customer experience. And maybe to put a trailer on the end of that, are there other collaborative efforts that you see through ChargeX or elsewhere that can also maybe help to streamline and improve the customer experience? So a bit of a two-part question. Feel free to take on either of those, maybe with a preference towards the first part of the question. It's a little more specific. Any volunteers before I start calling on people?

Frank Marotta: Sure. I guess is the representative automaker on the panel, I'll go first. Yeah, I mean– so I think the short answer is that NACS/J3400, it solves some issues, but not all. Right. The ergonomics advantages are evident, and that is huge for the customer experience piece. But the reliability piece still comes down to a lot of the things we've all talked about here today.

The reliability of the equipment, the payment and those sorts of things, and which is why I think longer term, J3400 may be a good– the step in the right direction, the more to the extent that we can continue to bring in strategies like ISO 15118 and just taking a little bit more of those interim steps that the customer needs to take, those deliberate actions, all of which– many of which have pain points associated with them that we're trying to address here in the near term. Those start to go away as we mature as an industry and start moving towards those things that are more complex behind the scenes but actually yield a much simpler customer experience.

John Smart: Yeah, I want to build on that last comment, Frank. When you– I think a lot about the gas fueling experience and the industry behind it. And I think it's been well demonstrated in the slides today that the EV charging ecosystem is vastly more complicated in terms of the communication, and the number of actors, and all that happens. The complexity is much greater.

But the customer doesn't shouldn't be bothered by that. All of that should be opaque to the customer. We need to– we need to make a simple a customer experience as possible. But the cool thing is the opportunity is there to have the charging experience be vastly more simpler, and more convenient, and just better than the gas fueling experience.

Things like plug-in charge. You plug-in and don't touch any buttons. The communication happens, the car and the charger identify each other. The payment happens behind the scenes. That's great. That's fantastic.

And that's already happening in industry, thanks to what we call bilateral agreements between one auto company and one charging network, for example. What we needed to do is scale that so that every everyone can enjoy the plug and charge experience. Likewise, the idea of receiving information about charging stations, it's tough to have to have to go between so many different apps to see every different network.

There's opportunity to commonize information or make universal information and data more universally available so that customers can choose their single app of choice, and all the roaming, and all the payment transactions, and everything happen behind the scenes, just like in the telecom industry. We can get there. So yes, the practitioners need to manage the complexity for the benefit of simplicity for the customer.

Alex Schroeder: Thanks, John. Anyone want to bring us home on this question, and we'll maybe shift over to questions from the audience?

Kenneth Tennyson: I think the only thing– go ahead, Jacob.

Jacob Matthews: Thanks. I'll go ahead. Yeah, Alex, I was just going to add that anytime there is a new device changeover, there is a risk for degrading reliability because that's all new to the industry. And so what we have done in ChargeX is in the middle of this is looking at even as a changeover is taking place from CCS1 to Max, all the different areas that can lead to pain points, whether it's the physical dimensions or physical attributes of the connector.

And so there's all kinds of work that's happening even in working group 2 just to shore up those particular areas so that we don't degrade reliability as we launch into with the next connector. And so there is growing pains, but we're trying to address all those with activities. And definitely, there's lots of engagement within SAE itself, with the task force there to understand all the different areas.

And the industry is very well engaged in helping to define and to resolve. So I think our vision is that it will definitely be a path forward with Max, but then it will also be a more reliable system ergonomically and all other ways of benefiting the end customer.

Kenneth Tennyson: Yeah, actually, Jacob, you captured the point I was going to raise, which is really that, I think, the key reliability opportunity is the formation of the standard right now, leveraging all of the learning that we have over a number of years. And so we're really excited to be a participant as well in the SAE J3400 working group.

And so I think there's a lot of value right now. We have a real opportunity, I should say, to address reliability at the standard level and make sure that we implement a connector that's the best possible for customer experience. So I think that's the key opportunity, and we're definitely happy to support that.

Cuong Nguyen: And I see, I wanted to close by saying that the plug is only one piece of the whole ecosystem. So even we have a plug, you have to look at end to end. Because you have the physical plug but then you have all the communication that you have to do, as well to actually enable the charging experience. So I think we are all contributing to that.

And then one thing that is good, that we are engaging with SAE and also CharIN is that as you saw from John’s slide, right, ChargeX has a finite– we have to finish by 2025. Right. But this work will live on. So I think the whole interaction with other consortiums, other entities would actually ensure that the work lives on and continue to evolve. So I think that's the big benefit there.

Alex Schroeder: Thanks, Cuong. And maybe a specific question for you, are telecom organizations represented in working group two? And how integrated is that to the EV deployment process?

Kenneth Tennyson: Yeah, we've got some industry representation from telecommunication side. I think there's very broad participation looking at, for example, on the payment ecosystem, there's a whole lot of different industry stakeholders that bring their knowledge to bear, to look at that from an end to end standpoint.

Alex Schroeder: OK. Frank, a question that came through is uptime. And the question was very specific to the definition, which I'll admit, assumes some knowledge of the federal definition of uptime. We'll defer to Jacob and John on that.

But, I would maybe ask you, what metrics do you see beyond uptime? We've been having a debate about uptime, and what it is, and what it isn't like. Are there things that you think we are missing from that discussion, referencing either the NEVI definition or anything else in your experience that are really important to consider? I think that would be a KPI question, but I will certainly let any others opine on that as well.

Frank Marotta: Yeah, sorry. I was on mute there. Yeah no, I'm actually pretty familiar with the NEVI definition of uptime. And internally, we've had a lot of conversations about that, informing the white paper I mentioned earlier. Yeah, I think what– I think what we need to get, I think where NEVI, the uptime definition maybe has a little too much wiggle room is in the exceptions or the exclusions.

So we just need to make sure that, as an industry, we're trying to– we only look at that as like the baseline, this is a starting point, and that we continue to look at things like overall availability, not just the uptime of that equipment, but the overall availability of it as maybe a complimentary metric to give some context to where is it that– or to help highlight, where is it that the NEVI guideline may be falling short as it relates to at least to uptime in particular?

Obviously, that's a very, there's a lot of definition in the whole NEVI guideline. But in terms of uptime, that's kind of where I see it maybe as being somewhere we might want, as an industry, look a little more closely and try to shore up anything that actually where there is an opportunity for some negative customer experiences to not really be satisfied by the existing definition as it stands today.

Alex Schroeder: John, I see you raised your hand. Maybe them is fighting words as someone that was the architect of the uptime definition. Anything that you wanted to add there?

John Smart: No, the opposite. Frank gets me– gets me hyped up about this in a good way. Because I always say, uptime is necessary, but not sufficient. If the charger is working, it also has to work for me, for my car. And we've looked at– the labs partnering with industry participants in ChargeX have looked at what we call the waterfall plot of for every session, where does it fail?

And there are a lot of sessions that begin with the charger "up," quote, unquote. Everything's operational, the screen is on, it looks like it's working, but this charge won't start for that vehicle. And so charge starts success, as you saw, was one of our interim and ideal KPIs is the next big frontier for understanding root cause and improving it so that so that even when the charger is working, it also works for my car.

I also wanted to add, I noticed a question from Terry Travis from EVNoire in the Q&A, asking if we're looking at the actual feedback from drivers themselves. I want to put out a call to anyone listening. It is important for us to not only develop quantitative metrics for the customer experience, like charge start success, but also to correlate those back to what people are saying about the experience and about the chargers.

So for those of you, such as Terry, you mentioned, you have some feedback or customer sentiment data from rideshare drivers, for example, we'd love to get a look at that data, and then correlate it to the quantitative metrics to calibrate, if you will, the numbers to actual sentiment. So look forward to talking to you offline, Terry.

Alex Schroeder: All right, John. You jump the line in front of the moderator there. But I actually had that next on my list of questions. My follow up to you is, how do people get you the data? What is the best way to share those insights with ChargeX?

John Smart: Yeah. So go to the website chargex@inl.gov. There's an email address there. It's simply chargex@inl.gov. And we monitor that inbox.

Alex Schroeder: And I do want to make sure uptime is something just recognizing the perspectives we have on the panel. Everyone's got a slightly different role. And I do want to make sure Jacob can– if there's anything you wanted to add on the discussion about, what is uptime? What are we missing? What are key metrics or other lessons learned that we would have there?

Jacob Matthews: Yeah, Alex. Thanks. This has been quite a passionate point for me, if I would. Because at the end of the day, the customer really wants to make sure that they can charge every time– first time every time.

And the uptime requirement sometimes gives quite a bit of wiggle room. And I think as already noted that the exceptions that we have allowed in there presently can sort of hide some things. So to the question that was in the chat, if a customer has an 800-volt vehicle but is connecting to a charging station that only supports 400, 500 volts, it will automatically request a lower capability while the customer got some charge, but they didn't get the charge that they were expecting because the charging station was not fully capable.

So I know that our requirement requires that a larger window of support for voltage. But nonetheless, if the requirement is such that it allows for stations that are not fully capable or are having shortfall of power because perhaps the grid is constrained, what have you, at the end of the day, the customer just doesn't get that full experience that they were expecting because– and there is no accounting for that particular scenario.

So I think perhaps as we go forward, we can think about how to improve that. But certainly, keeping a customer hat on and the lens to understand what their experience is and how we can minimize this would be is where we need to focus. So I'll keep pontificating, but I'll stop.

Kenneth Tennyson: Yeah, I think the only thing I would add, I think we've got some really good KPIs that are in working group one is that the customer experience has to be seamless, it has to be intuitive, it has to really recreate kind of that gas fueling experience for in EV charging. And so I think there's a lot of ways that we can measure that and we do to ensure customer experience.

And one of the ways that we can really simplify that is by driving customers to a really successful charging experience, like through plug-in charge rollout and things like this that will really transition the customer experience, not just looking at whether there's an up charger that can meet their needs, but that entire charging experience is a positive one, it's a simple one, it's an intuitive one. And so that's a big focus for electrify America is really looking at innovation, working with our OEM partners to really drive far beyond just a minimum uptime requirement, but really exceeding the performance that's there today and trying to drive that very intuitive and simple driver experience.

Alex Schroeder: Yeah. So what I'm hearing is the uptime debate rages on and for good reason. And it's really about there's no end of the road for customer satisfaction. It's something that there's always the next thing to do. You can't– you can't fully capture it with a definition of an upcharge.

So I think really great to hear the perspective from all of you and maybe pulling that out as a common thread. One, I think final question, and then I'm going to hand it back to Bridget to bring us home. I've seen a couple comments. It's not necessarily about why chargers and vehicles don't charge the first time or really the technical piece, but more about the, I would call it, like the time to resolution as like a workforce issue.

Just curious, John. Maybe that's a question for you. Like how is ChargeX kind of considering– how to deploy these at a speed that may not be there now. I guess the comment specifically made was that ports are down for weeks. And so I'm just curious, recognizing that's probably not a generally universally applicable. But is that something that ChargeX is focused on or workforce development and training? How are you thinking about that?

John Smart: Yeah. Thanks, Alex. We've been very thoughtful, as was mentioned, at least once. We have a short amount of time and a lot to do. So we've been very thoughtful about what our role is. And we are– ChargeX as a private partnership labs partnering with private sector are not tackling what I call operational issues that any individual company is responsible for, such as, dispatching technicians to fix a problem, and the maintenance, the operation and maintenance side of the business.

We think that is handled well by the private sector alone. However, we've looked at what are the technical enablers to help out. So the diagnostics and minimum required. Error codes is a big one. There are a lot of third party field service providers that are part of the consortium.

And they have shared, if they had more information about the nature of issues, they'd be able to fix them faster and more efficiently. There's just a single example. So we're looking at the technical enablers, but not getting into the O and M nuts and bolts.

Alex Schroeder: Yeah, that's a great way to put it. You all are developing solutions that can be deployed in the field to enable the solutions. John, I will maybe– I'll actually give you the last word. We've got very robust– sorry, Bridget, I'm going to give you the last word, but I want John to maybe speak to one thing.

We've got over 80 members in ChargeX. I know you're always looking to grow the tent kind of in the spirit of collaboration and really everyone needing to be at the table for this to be successful. How if there– is any organization that wants to be part of ChargeX that not– what should they be doing? How should they reach out and get involved?

John Smart: So I'll say that our charter or our framework document does not cap participation. If people– if companies want to participate, they're open to contacting us. Email chargex@inl.gov, or go to the website. However, our requirement is that all participating organizations actively contribute.

This is not– this is not an opportunity to just sit, and listen, and learn from– learn from your competitors or to pitch your wares. We need practitioners who will come to the table, share data, share insights, participate, even lead working taskforces and project teams. And so if you're a practitioner in industry, you're welcome to share with us your– where specifically you want to make a contribution. And we'd love to talk with you.

I will say I've recognized some names in the chat of some people who are probably thinking to themselves. I emailed you like two months ago, John, and you haven't written back to me yet. And so I apologize for the slow pace of response in some cases. But we're doing our best to grow the tent while also moving the team, the existing team forward.

Alex Schroeder: John, I'm glad to know it's not just me that's waiting for you to reply to my emails. So please, I really want to thank everyone that joined here today. Jacob, John, Frank, Ken, and Cuong, as well as Bridget and Hayley, really a rock star panel and incredible organization to make these things happen. They need to have a virtual applause button and Zoom.

And maybe they do. I've just not technically adept enough to know where it is. But please join me in thanking our panelists in whatever virtual way you'd like. It's been a really enjoyable to see ChargeX deliver and live up to its promise.

It's admittedly, I think, surprising as it sounds, to have the kind of impact that John and the ChargeX experience consortium are having and the time that they're having it, it's a challenge, right, I think to be able to move at the speed of industry and the speed of technology is not an easy task for anyone here. And really, I want to thank you all for your efforts.

Everyone is investing their time. To John's point, people that signed up, when they sign up, their sleeves are already rolled up. And on behalf of the Joint Office, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation cannot thank you enough for coming to the table with that attitude and really the shared mission. So thank you, again, for joining us today. Thank you all of your work to get us here today. And Bridget, I will turn it back to you to bring us home.

Briget Gilmore: Awesome. Thank you all so much. This was such a wonderful webinar. I just wanted to make sure that folks know that this webinar is recorded. These slides will be posted on our website.

You can be sure to check out the wonderful resources that were referenced today, all the wonderful reports that are hyperlinked here, and you'll be able to get them from the slides. Do reach out if you still have questions. We've got a great team, like Alex said, that can take your questions through our contact form at driveelectric.gov.

But just one last time, thanks so much to our presenters. This was a really wonderful way. I know I enjoyed getting to sit back and learn about ChargeX. Very cool to see the remote testing harness and all this amazing, yeah, work that's been done in just a year. So excited to see what the next year will bring. Thank you all. Appreciate it.

Frank Marotta: Thank you.

Briget Gilmore: Thank you.