Assembly Select Committee on Electric Vehicles and Charging Infrastructure

Good morning. We're going to call this Select Committee on Electric Vehicles and Charging Infrastructure to order, and we're here for an informational hearing to discuss electric vehicle or EV charging. Our focus will be to discuss difficulties in expanding EV charging, access us, how innovative programs and technology help overcome these barriers, and what actions the Legislature can take to ensure communities aren't left behind as the transportation sector electrifies. Before we begin, a little bit of housekeeping. First, I want to thank CSUN so much for hosting this hearing. CSUN is here in my district, Assembly District 40. Very proud to have them as a part of our district and grateful to share this space with them today. And fortunately, we have a Professor from CSUN who will be speaking later to tie in the work they're doing here, which is phenomenal. Next, we're not going to have phone testimony, and so public comment will be either submitted via email to the Committee or in person. Additionally, I'll maintain decorum during the hearing. We will not permit conduct that disrupts or otherwise impedes the hearing. Any individual who's disruptive may be removed from the room. So the transportation sector is currently the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California, and EVs will be critical to meeting our emission reduction goals. While the prior Joint Hearing with the Utilities and Energy Committee focused heavily on grid demand and grid infrastructure, this hearing will focus on charging infrastructure and charger deployment. The State estimates project that we need millions of chargers in order to support widespread adoption of EVs. This is a tall order, but California is definitely up to the challenge, as a number of programs and funding opportunities have been instituted to support infrastructure development at the state and local level. However, we're already finding disparities in who has access to charging, as well as communities that have been able to benefit from the expansion of EVs. The goal of this hearing is to delve into the challenges as well as explore novel approaches to reduce these disparities. With that, I'll open it up to any opening remarks from my colleague, Assembly Member Connolly, who I appreciate being here as well.

Thank you, Chair Schiavo. Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here. I'm Assemblymember Damon Connolly from Marin and Sonoma County. So happy to be here and want to acknowledge our Chair, our great Committee staff, and the panelists for being here today and moving the needle on this important conversation. The success of electrifying California, as we all know, is key to meeting our clean energy goals and reducing GHG emissions. We must get this right and move fast to ensure a cleaner and more sustainable future. So I look forward to the discussion today about how we can improve these efforts and close the gap, in particular in building enough charging infrastructure to meet California's growing needs. So, with that, thank you again and looking forward to the discussion today.

Thank you so much. Assembly Member so the first panel includes individuals both with the CEC and the CALSTART, and I'll ask the panelists to provide opening statements, and then we can turn to the Committee for questions. We wanted to start with Mark Wenzel branch manager of the light duty Electric Infrastructure and Analysis Branch at California Energy Commission. And I think because of redirections of flights this morning, he is on the screen instead of here in person. So sorry for the changes, but thanks for being flexible Mark.

Good Morning, chair. Shiavo I'm very sorry not to be able to join you in person. I was really looking forward to this. I do have a few prepared remarks, but let's pretend I'm making good eye contact and we're really engaging on this, and I look forward to any questions at the end as well. Thank you. So, Chair Shiavo and Mr. Connolly, thank you for the chance to present to you today. My name is Mark Wenzel. I'm the manager of the Light Duty Electric Vehicle Infrastructure and Analysis Branch of the California Energy Commission. This is a really exciting time to be working in EVs and charging infrastructure. About one in four new vehicles purchased in California is electric. Already, the state hit its sales target of one million zero emission vehicles two years early. The Governor also announced last month that we have hit our target of 10,000 fast chargers two years early. As you know, the Legislature has appropriated or allocated about $3 billion over six years to the CEC for Zev infrastructure, and the reauthorization of the Clean Transportation Program will add about $100 million per year for infrastructure, workforce development and other investments. We are grateful for this opportunity responsibility, and we think a lot about how to make sure that we're maximizing the impact from taxpayer funds. The CEC is committed to addressing equity in the transition to zero emission transportation. I'd like to talk a bit about some of the analysis that we do that informs investment decisions and then to some of our funding for advanced technologies. One analysis we do is the Zeb Infrastructure Plan, or the Zip, which is the statewide infrastructure strategy. The CEC leads development of the Zip in consultation with other state agencies. The first version was published at the end of last year, and the second one is targeted for a draft for public comment next summer. The Zip focuses on two principles accelerating deployment and addressing equity and connecting those principles to actions that the state takes. One benefit of this planning is that it brings together investments by the CEC and others, especially those approved by the Public Utilities Commission, and highlights the need and the opportunity for complementarity. A second analysis is a look at the geographical distribution of chargers and the implications for equity done under SB 1000. The first report showed that there were fewer chargers per capita in Low income communities. The second looked at driving time to the nearest DC fast charger and found some disparities in access even within disadvantaged and Low income communities. We're working on a third report for next year that will look at access to home charging across the same categories. All of these inform the annual Clean Transportation Program Investment Plan, which our Commission adopts to set the funding priorities. We seek out public comment on all of these efforts on equity. specifically. The CEC and the Public Utilities Commission work with the Disadvantaged Communities Advisory Group, which meets monthly and has groups of subject matter experts, including one on transportation electrification. Investments by the CEC are also informed by the Investment Plan Advisory Committee, which includes representatives of groups serving disadvantaged and Low income communities. We have several approaches to incorporating equity considerations and infrastructure strategy. One is a focus on medium and heavy duty vehicles. These vehicles tend to have greater emissions per mile, drive more miles, and tend to be operated in districts such as warehouse districts and around ports, making their air quality impacts disproportionately concentrated. More than half of Far funding for infrastructure is dedicated to accelerating the transition to zero emission medium and heavy duty vehicles. A second approach is the CEC's commitment to at least 50% of its investments being deployed in Low income or disadvantaged communities. Overall, about 68% of funding has gone to projects in disadvantaged and Low income communities, and with the recent enactment of AB One and 126, that commitment is now codified as a statutory requirement that at least 50% of the funding be spent on programs and projects that directly benefit or serve residents of disadvantaged and Low income communities and Low income Californians. This points to other measures of benefit and serve than whether a project is located within the boundaries of a census tract designated as disadvantaged or Low income. This is the topic. The CEC has been working on holding workshops and listening sessions starting about a year ago, and we'll be developing a process to define and measure these benefits for specific funding opportunities. A significant amount of our effort is on deployment of existing technologies to help meet the needs of the rapidly growing market. Even within that focus, we see a significant amount of innovation, for example, in the rates of fast charging. The minimum power rate we now Fund for fast charging is 150 kw. We also have funding opportunities that are aimed at newer technologies. The CEC funds research and development through Epic, the electric program investment charge, and about $50 million is planned for transportation electrification research, including efficient transportation, electrification and charging technologies, and these grant funding opportunities are under development now. We also had a funding opportunity for innovative charging solutions with categories for light duty and medium and heavy duty vehicles, and we have a second opportunity for medium and heavy duty open now with applications due on Friday. So advanced technologies such as wireless charging are also eligible for incentives under Energize. Our medium and heavy duty Infrastructure Block grant administered by CALSTART, which Alyssa Haerle may talk more about. The Zev market is rapidly evolving, and every day it seems that there are new technologies, concerns and opportunities. We look forward to continuing to work with partners, including the Legislature, to address equity and accelerate deployment. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Mark, and if you can hold on, we will ask questions after Alyssa is able to present as well. So I want to turn it over to Alyssa Haerle, the Director of Infrastructure Incentive Administration at CALSTART.

Thank you. Thank you, Select Committee and Assemblymember Schiavo, for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Alyssa Haerle and I'm the Director of Infrastructure Incentive Administration at CALSTART. I oversee the incentive programs, energize and communities in charge. Energize is for medium and heavy duty, EV and hydrogen refueling equipment, and Communities in Charge is for light duty level two EV infrastructure, and we administer these programs on behalf of the California Energy Commission. CALSTART is a global nonprofit. We work to accelerate clean transportation. Our work spans the State, United States, and internationally that we started here in California and work to spread the lessons and leadership that California has in electric, vehicle and clean transportation. We applaud California's leadership in this space, as well as the work this Select Committee has done to focus on EV and infrastructure and the topic of equity today. We also applaud the historic investments the State is making and the intentionality that is embedded within for considering disadvantaged and Low income communities into funding and programs. We think this is very important to spread the benefits of electrification throughout the State and to the communities most affected and burdened by air quality, health disparities, and the environmental impact of transportation emissions. I also want to thank Assembly Member Schiavo for your help with AB 126 and the authors, Senators Gonzalez and Assembly Member Reyes, for their efforts to pass this legislation that continues providing equitable funding for the Clean Transportation Program. The timely and equitable deployment of reliable charging infrastructure is incredibly important, and I'll review a few programs and activities that CALSTART has done that also embed equity with our programs. So first, as the Assembly Member knows, Communities in Charge is an equity and community focused program that we administer on behalf of the California Energy Commission. This is for light duty level two infrastructure. We engaged in extensive community, industry and funding stakeholder groups in the design of this program at the State's direction as well. We have a minimum of 50% of funding goes to priority populations which are disadvantaged and Low income communities, as well as tribal nations, and we have elevated priority within for charging infrastructure that is going to benefit communities and which is aligned around community connections. We worked with community based organizations and stakeholders to identify the types of community connections that communities would find of most benefit where they live, work and gather. So these include nonprofits in charge, congregations in charge, tribes in charge, healthcare in charge, local governments in charge, and a number of others as well, schools in charge, and programs that align with these community connections as well as those located in disadvantaged and Low income communities, those that are going towards multifamily housing and workplace in charge. Sorry, workplaces also receive elevated priority within these programs. We also have processes in place to make sure that no less than 50% of funding goes towards disadvantaged and Low income communities priority populations as defined by the state. The next program that I'll overview is Energize. This is the United States first medium and heavy duty charging program. This is for EV charging and for hydrogen infrastructure. We also have standard lanes for four lanes throughout the year. One is Fast Track. This is for programs that are most ready to go. And for fleet charging. We have Hydrogen Lane, which is focused on public and private hydrogen refueling infrastructure. We have an equity focused lane called EV Jumpstart. You have to meet certain equity criteria in order to qualify for that lane. That lane also receives elevated funding. And then we also have a public charging lane which focuses on public and shared charging for medium and heavy duty vehicles as well as offroad equipment. So within our equity considerations, these include location in disadvantaged and Low income communities as well as minority women owned businesses, schools that benefit disadvantaged and Low income communities, and transit that benefits and serves disadvantaged and Low income communities, as well as some additional equity considerations. We also have set aside funding that is coordinated with the HVIP Vehicle Voucher program that includes vocations such as Transit Drayage, which are heavy duty trucks going in and out of ports and rail yards, as well as schools. That is the Energized program. A couple of other programs, though I don't directly oversee, they do include aspects for funding infrastructure as well as consideration for equity. So CORE is the California Off Road Equipment Program, which provides benefits for electric and clean off road equipment. These also include plus-ups for infrastructure and plus-ups for disadvantaged and Low income communities. We also have the Clean Mobility Options Program, which aligns funding towards disadvantaged and Low income communities where there is direct benefit but also alignment with those communities. There is two parts where funding goes towards community needs assessments, where the communities can identify what types of innovative mobility options they would like to see in their community, and then an implementation side which funds communities to enact these programs that align with community needs assessments. So these can include car share bikes, a number of other things, as well as EV Infrastructure can be funded as well through this program, and eligibility is around disadvantaged and Low income communities and the benefits that it provides. I also provided the Assembly Member Schiavo with some work that we have recently done on Energization timelines. Last month we held a session among industry in Sacramento focused on reducing the timelines for energization and interconnection for EV charging equipment, provided the notes. And along with that, we also have an equity subject matter expert that is specifically focused around our strategy for including considerations of equity as defined by the state within California and other states around the United States as well as justice 40 to see how equity can be most aligned with what communities and stakeholders may want to see, as well as what benefits may go in and how we can include that in incentive programs as we look to replicate the learnings that California and the learnings and the strides forward that California has made in making equitable investments into clean transportation. So with that, thank you, Select Committee and Assembly Member Schiavo for having me today. And thank you, Mark, as well, my co-panelist.

Thank you both so much. It's really wonderful to hear about the good work That's happening, and we just wanted to open it up to questions. Now I'll turn it over to my colleague to see if he has some questions he'd like to ask.

Thank you and appreciate that testimony. I wanted to cover a couple of topics with the witnesses, what I'll call kind of the growing charging need, which is a theme we're going to be hearing a lot about today, as well as unequal access to charging. It was mentioned, I believe by Mark, that budget actions have invested millions into supporting individuals and communities and making the transition toward zero emission vehicles. Question of the panel how much of these investments are designated toward public charging stations, and in particular if we have a sense of how much funding went toward building public charging stations last year.

Hi. Assembly Member. This is Mark Wenzel speaking. I'm sorry, I don't think we have that number offhand. That's not the way that we have broken it down in our reporting. I'm afraid we're going to have to get back to you on that one.

Okay, I appreciate that. And I'm kind of also wearing my Utilities and Energy Committee hat as well. Would be interested in how many charging stations have been built as a result of state funding. Do we have a total number statewide to date on that?

We do have that number. It is around 12,000 charging stations that the state has funded that are installed and active now, and we have another about that number in the pipeline.

Okay, great. And what is the current timeline looking like for meeting our EV charging station infrastructure goals?

Thank you. So as I mentioned, we did meet the goal of 10,000 DC fast stations two years early, the goal of 250,000 level two stations or total public and private shared stations by 2025. We have been able to track that the funding is there for them. We're looking at the timing very closely. We are not 100% confident we're going to hit 2025, but we think it'll be by 2026.

Great. You kind of anticipated my question, and are we on track to meet our goals? It sounds like a little bit early in terms of current in terms of 2025, you believe at least by 2026 we could meet that additional target?

Yes, That's where we're tracking it now. I will say there is a bit of a trade off between the DC fast charging and the level two charging. So our modeling calls for some number of DC fast and some number of level two. The more DC fast there is, the less level two is needed and vice versa. So I wouldn't say even though we're not quite on target for those goals that were set 10 years ago, in terms of the ratio between the two of them, we think that we're doing all right. Obviously a lot more to be done, but we think we're doing all right on the number of chargers available in total.

Thanks. And obviously one particular interest of ours on the Select Committee is to the extent there is a gap or anticipate a gap, how can the Legislature act to help close that, or what do we need to be doing as a state? Do you have any kind of sense of that right now? Are there additional things we can do to, if not meet the 25 goal, at least get as close as possible?

Well, thank you. I mean, I mentioned that we're really grateful for the opportunity and the responsibility of the funding that the Legislature has appropriated and allocated. And we are in the process of continuing to develop what that looks like over time and will continue to evolve over time in terms of specific roles for the Legislature. I think it's worth my job to make a comment now, but there's a formal process for the Administration to make those proposals, and we really look forward to working through that process and being part of that partnership.

No, I appreciate that. Obviously, we have a 2030 goal in terms of EV adoption. So one question is obviously allocation of funds within that goal, including toward public charging infrastructure. So I guess I will just throw this question out there as part of that broader discussion. Would allocating a higher percentage of the funds available for ZEVs as we approach 2030 to building charging stations help reach the 2030 goal and.

Yeah, thank you. I think That's really an interesting question and something that deserves some dynamic management as we watch the trends both in EV deployment and an EV charging deployment. As you know, very broadly, the California Air Resources Board manages the vehicle side of things, including regulations and investments, and the CEC very broad has the infrastructure side, including regulations and investments. The Administration proposals take into account both the needs and the opportunities identified by both of those agencies and others.

And so I think the Administration position is probably best reflected in the annual budgets that the Governor presents.

Great. And maybe turning to Alyssa on kind of the unequal access to charging, which you hit on in your testimony, and the perception is it is more difficult to install in multifamily housing scenarios. Wondering if you can comment from your perspective, why is that, and kind of what can we do about it?

That is an aspect that CalStar is studying further what I can say within communities in charge. In our first funding wave earlier this year, we did get an incredible demand for charging in multifamily housing, and we'll look to how that progresses. We know that there's an incredible amount of interest. Home charging will be incredibly important, and we certainly want to make sure that those living in multifamily housing have accessibility to charging infrastructure.

We do know that there may be some differences in the grid availability for buildings of that size, but we think that it's incredibly important to meet that demand. We also think workplace charging can also be of benefit to those who may not directly have accessibility at home or who may have slower level charging at home.

But the underlying assumption sounds like there is increasing demand.

Yeah, we've seen incredible interest in multifamily housing charging. A large proportion of funding that was requested during that funding lane was for multifamily housing.

So kind of same broad question. What can we do from your standpoint? And just to throw it out there, are there any regulations or statutory changes that need to happen through the Legislature to increase access to charging in certain communities?

We applaud the state in their focus on priority populations. We do know that certain communities may have different challenges. Urban areas may have different issues than rural. In urban areas, there may already be a lot of demand on the grid, not just for transportation electrification, but also building electrification. In rural areas, there may be less infrastructure. Tribal areas also may have other structural concerns with infrastructure generally.

So if the requirement is to have network charging on any state funded program, then areas that may have telecommunications challenges may have difficulty installing networked charging. But other than that, I think that medium and heavy duty infrastructure and charging infrastructure That's accessible to those types of vehicles, they may have different locations on the vehicle That's charging. And a parking lot approach may not work for all types of vehicles in that way.

But we are seeing an incredible amount of innovation, not just in the technology side, but also in the business models. Charging as a service is a new type of business model that is seeking to address the challenges for medium and heavy duty vehicles. And there's quite a bit of focus also on drage and independent owner operators and serving small fleets. In that business model, we'll see how those business models evolve to see if it meets those challenges.

For those that may not be able to install their own charging infrastructure and may not necessarily be able to rely on purely public access, shared charging will also be important and being able to perhaps in advance, Reserve charging for those that are using these vehicles for commercial purposes.

Thanks. Is there an effort to structure or even restructure EV investments around, looking at things like population density for certain areas?

I would have to get back to you on that. Specifically, I do know that within communities in charge we are looking at geographic spread and in our next funding lane looking at allocating the funding based on different geographies of the state similar to how the Golden State priority project and Cali VIP have their different zones for California to make sure that the funding that is there's an incredible amount of demand and streamlined access for permitting and other aspects in Los Angeles.

But if someone is traveling through the Central Valley or other parts of the state, just because you live in Los Angeles doesn't mean That's the only place you travel. So making sure that charging access is.

Throughout the state, yeah, I think That's really important. But we're also all hearing the stories about showing up at the charging station. You're in a rush and you have to wait. Right? So just kind of some sense of yeah, doesn't make sense to look at density in certain areas as well. There still seems to be a major cost barrier for lower income Californians and working families to purchase electric vehicles. In the first instance, is the state doing anything to help with this cost burden?

I can't speak to the light duty vehicle vouchers because Calsart doesn't administer those programs. But for heavy duty, for medium and heavy duty vehicles, we do administer the HVIP program, which are vehicle vouchers that are at the point of sale that help offset the cost of transitioning to medium and heavy duty EVs and hydrogen vehicles. The California Off Road Equipment Program also includes Vouchers that are at point of sale to help defray the costs of transitioning.

There is also some additional plus ups if you're in a disadvantaged or Low income community. We also have a program called Cal Fleet Advisor, which just launched this year, which is primarily focused around technical assistance for fleets that are transitioning in a particular attention to small fleets.

Yeah, and I know there's a program called Clean Cars for all as well which seems to be getting some traction. Mark, I don't know if you wanted to comment on kind of the issue of affordability adoption among certain communities with regard to EVs.

Sure, thank you. You mentioned clean cars for all, and that would be my first response on that as well. So the Air Resources Board is phasing out its General statewide rebate for electric vehicles and focusing its attention on clean cars for all, which is an equity focused program. So it does include, just as Alyssa was saying, for the medium and heavy duty vehicles. It does include different rebate amounts for different population and types of vehicles.

But that program is being expanded from a few air districts to statewide.

Great. And then final question for now, a little bit broader again, but just to throw it out there, are there any immediate or priority actions that the Legislature should take next session to close the charging gap in the state?

So we are studying the energization and construction timelines and having a series of roundtables. We just had our second one last month. But we hope that the next sessions will be solutions focused and inform some policy choices that may be able to be made. We do applaud the efforts already with AB 2061 in increasing reliability and uptime for charging stations that are publicly funded and funded by Ratepayers.

We think that maintenance and service of these infrastructure is also incredibly important, not just the supply chain for installing, but the supply chain for parts to continually maintain. These are incredibly important. We also think that the recent Bill, I believe was passed 410, that would provide that funding for utilities or direction around utilities to be able to have increased flexibility in building out the grid with reasonable expectations of demand.

But if it's based on individual requests for service rather than a regional approach I think rather than doing it sort of piecemeal as it comes being able to take into account fleet plans and other items that have a high degree that these will go in the ground, that there will be this demand and being able to build out ahead of time, I think is great to see that that legislation has passed.

Agreed. Mark, anything to add on that?

No, thank you for the opportunity. Nothing to add.

Great.

Okay, thank you. I also have a couple of questions. First, Mark. In the next panel, we'll have an opportunity to hear about some creative and innovative approaches to expanding charging access. And while I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, how is the CEC approaching future proofing funding opportunities for the fields That's changing rapidly and evolves quickly? And is there anything the Legislature can do to help? And I know we'll be hearing from the State of Michigan, where they're doing electrification of roads and wireless charging.

And I heard you mention that. I'm a huge fan. As someone who goes from airport to events all day back to an airport and has no time in between to charge. So if I could charge and drive, it would make my life so much better. And I think it's also a really important technology to think about addressing equity too.

If people can charge and drive, they don't have to worry about being able to charge at home and plug in at night in multifamily housing or apartments where they may have less access, or electrifying parking lots and making it more widely accessible to charge wirelessly when people are parked at different locations. So, would love to hear your thoughts on other emerging pieces of technology that can really address equity in a big way.

Yeah. Thank you very much. So we're really actively thinking about that technological evolution, trying to both deploy for today and for the future. So one aspect of technologies is looking at connector types for fast charging. So for example, in the Zip last year we said we'd be phasing out our support for chatamo and now we have a statement out just a couple of weeks ago on planning for a transition period to the Tesla or the Max charger.

I also mentioned that 150 minimum power rating for fast chargers that we now Fund. So That's future proofing as not all the cars today can take advantage of that higher power, but more will be able to in the future. So charging rates and connectors, I think the third I point to for light duty would be communications.

Really making sure that cars and chargers are interoperable and able to receive signals that will help to shift some of the charging time to when the power is least expensive and when renewables are most available on a micro scale. That technology. Automated load management can be really helpful in trying, in trying to get the most chargers into the smallest panel space. So in many cases panel capacity or sometimes distribution capacity is the constraint.

If cars are going to be in a space for a long time, say overnight charging at a multifamily housing dwelling or workplace charging, you can get more cars, more power if there's management that evens the load out between the cars over that period of time. And That's something that we've been able to Fund in some of our multifamily housing grant funding opportunities on wireless. We've funded opportunities with Antelope Valley Transit on wireless charging for transit.

That seems to be the application where that technology is moving forward most rapidly, but we're also looking forward to hearing from the testimony from the State of Michigan and understanding what other opportunities there might be. Thank you.

Wonderful. Yeah, we actually were able to take a tour yesterday of Antelope Valley Transit Authority and it's pretty incredible what they're doing, being able to run their buses for 12 to 14 hours a day without having any downtime, having to take buses offline to charge because they've strategically placed wireless charging pads throughout the route. So that they can pick up a 10 minute charge throughout the day at the different stops that they make.

And Alyssa, I don't know if you have anything to add on this topic too.

I went to high school in the Antelope Valley, so it's incredible to see that type of technology in the valley there. And I know that it's really known for aerospace, but it's great to see that it's also known for having a clean transit authority. Within Energize, we do allow inductive charging to be funded through these programs.

We've seen that there could be interest with transit authorities and perhaps also ports where there may be not as much space for charging equipment, or where there may be a concern of running over chargers. This does require that there's technology not just in the ground for this charging, but also on the vehicle. So within Energize we do Fund sort of up to the plug, which for inductive charging would be the Patterson, the infrastructure there, as well as Cadinary charging, the overhead charging that transit may use.

I would have to check if we've received any requests there. I do know that the standards for inductive charging are still being developed. So as this technology moves from the pilot phase and into more market applications, we're really excited to see this level of innovation in technology. We also have vehicle to grid charging is also eligible and Energize, we've seen interest from school districts.

We're excited to see those pilots throughout California and do know that the rate case is still being determined on what that might be, but we call it V to G ready, the standard still being developed. We also see interest in hydrogen. Transit agencies also have interest in hydrogen where there may be duty cycles that don't accommodate a battery electric vehicle as well for longer range routes and items like that.

In terms of business model, charging as a service is a new type of business model that we're seeing. We're excited to see how that develops as well as trucking as a service, where you can also have a service contract for typically heavy duty trucks. Within our program Etruck, which we also are in partnership with the California Energy Commission on looking at megawatt charging. If there's more interest, I can get further information on that and know that the standard is still being developed there.

I definitely agree on load management and the items that my co panelist Mark has brought up. I'll also note that in the off road program there is funding for mobile charging. They call mobile power units and these can provide there's different configurations. But in the last funding cycles we've seen incredible demand for mobile charging, typically for offroad equipment.

You may be using this equipment in areas where there is no grid access, but there may also be interest in areas where they might not yet have grid capacity or where this can be movable within a yard where there might not be as much space. We've seen some interesting developments on regenerative for Trus, which are transport refrigeration units. And then with the Clean Mobility Options program, we also see that innovative mobility can be a great accompaniment to electrification of transportation.

So it may not necessarily be reliant on car ownership, but accessibility and safe use of bikes and micromobility throughout. We know that there's been some car share or electric shuttles that are more dynamic and that reducing vehicle miles traveled is an important part of the equation as well, and reducing emissions.

Thank you. And I think Mr. Connolly has a follow up, too.

Yeah, really happy that you brought up vehicle to grid. I think that has a lot of promise. So wondering if you could just elaborate for folks tuning in on kind of what that is, so called bi directional charging, and what some of the opportunities are for that.

Yeah, so there's a number of different acronyms here, but to make it easy, bi directional charging is when similar to, like, when you have solar on your house, and you could send energy back to the grid. So with bi directional charging, you could send energy through the charging infrastructure either back to the Grid, back to a battery storage, or to another vehicle.

So I think this offers a great opportunity for school districts where the school buses could be used for emergencies, where the grid may be out, they could use the power to serve the buildings or the emergency use cases there as fleets consider. There's other aspects of just the technology being available. Insurance and how they'll treat the battery cycles in this case is still something That's evolving, but incredibly interested in where this is going and how the standards evolve as well.

Yeah. Even on a household level, as we confront emergencies and in effect, have kind of a micro grid opportunity. One follow up on that is the state, or are the utilities considering creating incentives to encourage Californians to contribute to the Grid through bi directional charging, or school districts for that matter?

I believe that the utilities and Public Utility Commission are going to be considering those. I can't speak as much specifically with the Energy Commission's other activities, but within Energized, as well as in particular the set aside for school districts, there is a lot of interest in vehicle to grid, and it is an eligible technology for infrastructure That's ready for bi directional.

And this is Mark, if I might jump in on that. I just wanted to thank both the Assembly Member and Alyssa for their reference to school bus and bi directional. The CEC, just at the end of September, announced four proposed grants for school districts to do bi directional charging with their school bus fleets. So That's certainly a technology we're looking at as well and trying to advance.

Wonderful, thank you. I'm really encouraged to hear prioritizing investing in Low income and disadvantaged communities and wonder what a couple of things about that. How does that work? Is there overall coordination? Because I know there's a whole industry of private companies who are installing chargers, investing in charging infrastructure. And so is there coordination on any level around the work that you all are doing to invest in charging infrastructure with the industry, to kind of ensure people aren't tripping over each other?

I don't know how much That's a concern or problem. I mean, obviously these investments are happening because there's not a lot of investment happening in these areas. But at a certain point it seems like that might be something that could come up. And then the other question is how you invest in infrastructure and communities.

One of the things as an EV driver myself, that I see a lot and I know that we as a state have done a lot to address is around uptime and reliability and chargers. And for example, in the North Valley here, there's about five fast chargers in the whole North Valley. Two of them are always broken and the other ones are always taken up. So you got to wait in line if you need a fast charger. Luckily, CSUN has installed a couple more.

Think that increased it a little bit. If you can find them on CSUN's campus. How does the follow up maintenance piece happen for these targeted communities to make sure that those chargers are actually working and available going forward for charger maintenance?

I can note that within our programs, Energize and communities in charge, we do ensure terms and conditions to make sure that the charging infrastructure is maintained and reliable. We're working with the Energy Commission on the data that would be coming in from the chargers afterwards and in coordination with the regulation That's determined with AB 2061.

Sorry, is there funding for that? Is that part of the funding to help maintain it or it's on the turn it over to operators?

I'll have to look specifically for communities in charge, but for Energize there is some eligible costs. One time costs, not necessarily every month over time, but one time costs for warranty or for maintenance contracts. So it's encouraged within the program. It's also within the terms and conditions to have the charging infrastructure maintained and up for a certain amount of time. I think that maintenance is incredibly important. There's some aspects of having the workforce that is trained and able to maintain this infrastructure.

I think that one of our Member companies, Charger Help, is doing a great amount of work here in workforce development and also being able to work with the EV charger manufacturers to triage items where there may be just to be able to give that feedback on how the maintenance is doing and what are the typical downtime reasons. But I think that the supply chain for maintenance as well, for parts and pieces, to be able to have that in a timely manner.

So that not just holding necessarily those who own the infrastructure accountable. If they're not able to get pieces of equipment to maintain the infrastructure they have, that might also be a hindrance. So I think that it's important to be able to have the workforce there that can maintain these as well as the parts and service contracts.

Just on workforce, is there any.

Work.

To actually recruit from the communities you're targeting to train, or is there any kind of infrastructure for that to train and place people in this kind of work That's going to be needed?

So CalStar is going to be looking at more workforce development aspects in this area. I know there's a lot of other organizations that have done quite a bit here as well. I think that within Energize, as an example, for those requesting more than a certain amount of money, they have to answer qualitative questions. And a couple of these questions are to community benefit and alignment with community needs and priorities.

And within some of those examples, workforce development or local hiring preferences could be part of that aspect. And I think that That's an important contribution some of these programs can make in benefiting community.

Absolutely. Mark, did you want to add anything here?

Well, thanks very much. Appreciate the chance. Yes, I think Alyssa covered some good comments on reliability. I'd like to speak specifically to what the CEC is doing about that. So since 2021, our grants have required reliable operations 97% uptime for five or six years after the beginning of operation for the charger. Under AB 2061 and AB 126, we are writing regulations that will apply to any chargers funded either through public funds or through ratepayer funds.

So those chargers approved by the Public Utilities Commission, we have a draft of those regulations and a staff report that came out and a comment period that closes tomorrow. So if anybody's listening and would like to weigh in, we'd love to get those comments as well. Under AB to 126, which passed, was enacted just last month, there's a slightly stronger requirement to ensure that those performance standards, that 97% applies to all state and ratepayer funded chargers. So we'll be incorporating that as well.

And then to the issue of operations and maintenance specifically, as Alyssa said, in our competitive grant funding opportunities, we also have a list of eligible costs and warranties are eligible, as are operations and maintenance expenses. So it's something that we can cover as part of the funding that we provide. So an issue that we have been working on for a little bit, obviously much more to do on it because the reliability and customer experience has not been universally great.

So we are going to continue to take suggestions and direction on that, but it's something that we're putting a lot of focus on too.

Wonderful, thank you. And so one of my fears, with a few years of significant influx of funding That's available right now is that at the end of those years, if additional funding stalls, we may not have ensured that the most underserved communities are able to benefit from EVs. In the prior hearing, the Joint Hearing that we had, Professor Callaway showed findings that black and Latino residents tend to have less capacity for new load than the average household.

And we were talking about kind of shovel ready projects. And additionally, the CEC and others have found that they have less access to public chargers, irrespective of income. So, in terms of the CEC evolving and improving programs, based on the findings in AB 2147, how is that working with the home charging access reports, and how is that evolving?

Yeah, thank you. This is something that we are paying a lot of attention to. We do see a longer term role for public funding to address equity needs. Where the private sector leaves gaps, those gaps may change over time, and we want to be proactive in understanding and addressing them. There are two specific efforts I'll point to.

So one of the figures in the staff report for this hearing was drawn from our SB 1000 report showing that within the Los Angeles area, there are differences in charging access. So if you filter for the disadvantaged and Low income communities, some of those are within a few minutes of fast charging and have that access, while others are still more than a 10 minute drive away. So that variation exists even within those communities that we're trying to address.

To get to that variation, we're preparing a funding opportunity that will be specifically for charging. That reduces drive times for communities that don't have that access now, so ones that are more than 10 minutes away. A second effort I would point to is in workplace charging. So right now, there's a sense that workplace charging is primarily for white collar workers and big office buildings.

And our draft analysis under the AB 2127 report breaks out the different types of workplaces as we're thinking about how to make it more widely available to retail workers and others that haven't traditionally been reached. And then the third maybe that I would point to quickly would be on some of our multifamily housing. So, as I mentioned, the Zip, the Zeb infrastructure plan, states that state policy is to maximize home charging. It's often the most convenient and least expensive.

Multifamily housing is an eligible category in our level two block grants, including the one that Alyssa was describing earlier. And we also have competitive solicitations, including one that we call Reach, reliable, and equitable. At home charging allowed for a variety of approaches, so it allowed for DC fast chargers, near multifamily housing on site or off site, level one or level two, and use of load.

We're seeing we have these goals not only of installing the chargers, but also demonstrating and testing business and technology models that could be more widely applied replicable and scalable models. Thank you.

Thank you. This brings me back to my earlier question that I don't think was touched on. Is there coordination happening with the industry around installation, or is there a need for that? Is it just we need so much that everybody should do as much as they can and we don't need to worry about that right now? How is that working?

And there's no master plan of you go here and we'll go here and we'll all do our thing and we're going to do it together, but is there coordination happening? Is there more That's needed or how does that work?

Yeah, thank you. I think right now we are not opportunity constrained. So there are certain extent to which there's plenty of room for a wide variety of think. You know, much longer term, we want to see some competition between types of charging so that somebody is choosing between DC fast charging, which might be more convenient, and closer, but potentially slower.

There's a time penalty there versus, say, level two charging at work where the cost might be lower, but they might not get the full charge they need for their weekend plan. So I think longer term, we're interested in making sure that all of these options are available and people are able to choose what works best for them in terms of specific coordination. One thing I would point out is that almost all of our funding requires a match by the private sector.

So the private sector is very heavily involved in both investment and specifically in choosing the sites. So the CEC does not generally select sites. We select communities or target types of charging that we'd like to see. And then we ask the private sector to bring us their best ideas about where that charging can go. And one example of this, I think, would be the Nevi funding, which is the federal funding for corridors of DC fast charging.

And in the draft solicitation that we have described, and we expect the solicitation to be out pretty shortly now, we put forward the same requirements that the federal government had about chargers every 50 miles and stations of greater than a certain size, but we didn't say they had to go here, here, and here along the freeway.

We want the private sector to do that analysis of where the infrastructure is available, where there are amenities that will be attractive to drivers, what the spacing is that makes most sense, and then bring that to us. So I would say we also speak with the major charging providers fairly regularly and then all of our processes in terms of both what we Fund and then within a specific solicitation, how that solicitation is designed and constructed, ask for public comment on all of those too.

So there's definitely a chance for the private sector and anybody else to weigh in.

Wonderful. Okay, thank you so much. For that. Clarification and Alyssa, just a couple last questions for you and I think we'll wrap up. And thank you both so much for being here today and for all of this important information for us to chart our path. So, Communities in Charge seems to be extremely successful in nearly all of the current cycle funds spoken for. I know for underresourced communities, shovel ready itself can be a big hurdle.

And can you speak to some of the technical assistance and what that looks like through this program and if there's potential opportunities for improvement in future cycles?

Yeah, so within Communities in Charge, we do have different aspects of technical assistance that are offered. We do have workshops about how to apply for the program, but we also have office hours that are available throughout the funding cycle opening where prospective applicants can schedule time with our team to be able to talk through their technical assistance questions.

We also work with our partner, create alternatives for equity focused technical assistance and being able to see where there might be projects within communities that can be encouraged along or helped along. So I think there's different considerations. Technical assistance can be a very broad term. So within a block grant there might not be as much space to do white glove sort of service of helping specifically with that transition.

But I think there's different elements within our design along with having the shovel readiness and the focus on different tiers of readiness. There is also considerations for equity within there and also the ability to have milestone payments currently within some of our programs so that they don't have to wait until the absolute end to get reimbursed for their programs. And I think that within Energize, we've also been working on technical assistance. For example, for school districts may have a different experience than transit agencies or Drayage.

And I think that the learnings from our new California Fleet Advisor will be really instrumental in how that technical assistance can be scaled. That one specifically focusing on trucks and fleets. But I think the learnings from that can also be helpful to see what the state more broadly can do there and focus technical assistance.

And that technical assistance then includes things like if your home electrical panel doesn't have the capacity for installing chargers or in multifamily housing, things like that, does it go to that level to support upgrading?

So we do have resources available on our website for what different sort of documents may be required or different steps that may be throughout the process. And then we also have extensive engagement with industry, with other programs that Fund these funding stakeholders as well as equity focus groups to continually improve the resources that we have available. We also CalStar have Infrastructure Insight tool as well as a Funding Finder tool.

And the Funding Finder can also help you find other types of funding opportunities for vehicles, equipment or infrastructure that may be available to you. So for communities in charge, we don't focus on home charging for single family homes, but for multifamily housing. I think That's an area that we can explore more as well to see if there's different types of resources that may be different than other types of charging that may be going in.

But I think through the continual engagement with not just industry but also community to see what is needed for more of these programs to come along, for more of these charging projects as well as for the equitable distribution of them and making sure that communities throughout the state have the opportunity.

Great. And last question, and you were, I think, getting to it there, you were talking about tools for people to find funding. So if people are watching today and they want to find out about how they can access funding, where should people go, how can they access these programs and engage?

I'd be happy to look up the exact web URL for the Funding finder, but Calcit does have a Funding finder. It's available on both the communities in charge and the Energize website under Resources Funding Finder and our team is working to continually update that as well.

I think that there's a lot of opportunities throughout the state, whether from the Air Resources Board, from the Air Quality Management Districts, from utilities themselves, not just investor and utilities, but also some interesting municipal programs as well as those that the California Energy Commission are funding. So I think there's those as well as the federal investments going in and private investment.

I think there's a lot of opportunity here and I think that the more the state can align around the priorities for priority populations and I really applaud the efforts as well to investigate how the charging can go in, not just the geographic equity where the charging stations are located, but who it serves. A transit agency, for example, may have a number of routes that specifically serve disadvantaged communities, but where those are charged may be in a centralized depot that may be in any type of community.

So looking to where the services are benefiting is also, I think, important.

Wonderful. Well, thank you both. Really appreciate the work that you're doing, especially around addressing equity and access in communities that need it the most. And so appreciate you both being here and we'll let you go for now. We'd love to bring you back for a full panel at the end if we have time for that as well.

If there are any more questions but want to bring up the second panel, which we have, I think also on the screen, Michelle Mueller, who's the manager of the Connected and Automated Vehicles at the Michigan Department of Transportation, who will be up first and would love for panelists to provide opening statements. And then we can turn to the Committee for questions and we'll turn it over to Michelle thank you.

Just confirming you guys can hear me. Okay?

We can. Thank you.

Perfect. Yes, absolutely. I apologize that I could not be there in person, but due to some other scheduled meetings and things, we couldn't make it out there. But happy to be able to share virtually with you. So I do want to express my thank you to the Committee and Senator for the opportunity to share some things that are happening in Michigan and then hopefully be able to answer any of the questions you have.

We do take great pride in sharing amongst and across our different states because we're all really working and trying to achieve the same goals. So go ahead and advance to the next one, please.

All right, so we put quite extensive this is just do a quick, high level capture of the EV situation here in Michigan. And then I'll dig know one of the lead projects that we have in the space that focuses on the inductive charging, which you had referenced in the last, you know, really kind of boiling into three pillar areas that we look at, with one of those being around our industry and workforce.

How do we enable the workforce here, how do we bolster the manufacturing core as many are very familiar with? We do have a strong manufacturing in the automotive space specifically and really growing in the battery space here in the State of Michigan. The second looking at providing a safer, greener and more accessible transportation infrastructure and services.

So really focusing on how do we accelerate EV adoption here in Michigan with our users of the system and purchasing the vehicles and giving them the confidence that they can charge those with some of the things that were talked about on the last panel. We have to figure those out and give confidence in order for consumers to buy.

And then also how do we grow the infrastructure side of that in the EV space with different types of charging that really allows the opportunity for an ecosystem creation of different types of charging as opposed to relying on one that may not be suitable to all users of the system. And then the last, which really is into my space, especially with the project I'm going to show you, is really leading in policy and innovation.

So leading the R D. As I said, we have a ton of that going on here in Michigan. We're very happy to be supporting that. And then how do we expand that industry here in Michigan. So this really just know the core goals that we continue to evaluate and strive for in the space. Can you advance the next one please? So we have a couple of efforts that we do with that.

The top half of the slide really shows our different statewide or state agencies and really how each of those bring a piece to the puzzle. We're very proud of this collaboration that happens.

We are one and maybe the only state that actually has this where we've been able to access the different departments, create a great environment, utilizing the specialties of those departments, as you can see in the picture, really bringing forward the infrastructure, the talent, the policy, the energy as far as for the charging and the grid. And then also from the economic development side. So as we bring these together, we collaborate.

A lot of us are on the same calls with whether it be companies, projects, those types of things because we have resources, we have experts in the area where we can actually solve challenges and create that. Like I said, that ecosystem that really brings it together in the bottom half, you'll see, we created accounts on future mobility electrification originally under Governor Snyder, it was just accounts on future mobility. When Governor Whitmer took office, she did expand that into electrification.

I'm not going to go through all the Members of that, but you can see as you read through those, a very diverse group, both from the public side, but then also from private and academia that participate in that group. And it really has a core function not only in electrification.

We do cover other mobility initiatives and we talk through, we have strategic areas that we focus on to try to bring any challenges that may be existing to implementation and move those forward with the help of all the folks that sit on this council. Next slide, please. So what are some different?

Again, I'm going to say just trying to stay high level, really looking at different ways, different places, different types of things we can do to try to really make this an Equitable type of system to be used. We have different deployments that we're doing. One of those is Lake Michigan EV circuit. Really what that is, is for those that may be familiar, may not be. We do have Lake Michigan and we have border states around Lake Michigan.

So what we've done is we've created a MOU with our partners in other states to actually create a EV circuit around the lake. It's a very high, heavily traveled tourism route in the summer, and a lot of people use it for different activities and things. So the charging infrastructure That's there, there is some already that exist. And what we've done is we've evaluated where the gaps are associated with giving the confidence to drivers that they can actually travel that circuit.

They can enjoy their recreational activities, and they know that they can get there. They know they can complete their trip, and they also know they can return home and have the ability to get a charge throughout that. So we're underway with some funding associated with filling in those gaps. So hopefully happy to share some updates on that in the future as that continues to get built out. The other is working with our state parks.

Our Department of Natural Resources has moved pretty actively in the space to install charging stations through different funding opportunities. So that when people are enjoying the recreations here in Michigan, which is again very high use area for us is in our state parks, is that they can go in, they can park, they can begin receiving a charge while they're doing their activities, and maybe they're having a picnic and things like that.

And they can do those, they can get a charge, and they can continue on with their day. The other is focusing on EV Jobs academy I talked about in the last slide, looking at the workforce.

So as we continue to look at opportunities for expanding our workforce and those are not only looking at maybe a group of generation That's coming through high school, college, those types of things, but also really looking and focusing on the folks that maybe have chosen a different line of work to go into the pandemic created a lot of that, and now giving the opportunity for people in that space and looking for those opportunities to maybe find something that wasn't available for them previous that they're really interested in doing today.

Had a lot of interest in the generation, as I said, coming up through college, that they didn't even know these exist. Right? It's moving fast, it's moving quickly. But we cannot put aside the fact that we still need people to manufacture all of these hardware pieces. We need people to install them, we need them to maintain them and of course, we need people to be operating these systems and looking at how do you service those and what's the expertise in doing that.

So we spend quite a bit of time working with our universities, from our community colleges up through four year degrees and whatnot to look at opportunities for that training, and then also look at training for continuing the workforce. That we do have in these spaces to continue to grow them and maybe they find an interest that they didn't have and give them the opportunity for those training as well. The last one I'll hit on is what we call a communities toolkit.

Really what it is, is taking information That's in there to give assistance to communities, right? Everybody, at least here in Michigan, a lot of the local communities tend to look up to the state for direction, guidance, education, those types of things as new things come out. This is no different. So we've created a toolkit that allows the opportunity for them to look at it for future planning opportunities of things that they need to be considering as we are out and working to.

I know mentioned on the last panel was the Nevi plan. We obviously have that underway here in Michigan as well. So we have communities, we have groups of people who are applying for these nevy funds. And these are opportunities and tools that will allow them to understand things they need to be considering and things that they need to be thinking about as they put in their applications and then as they look forward to deploying in the future. Next slide, please.

So now jumping into and one of the reasons I wanted to use some slides was to give some visuals. I mean, visuals are always super cool with new stuff. So these are actual pictures that have been installed. What you'll see up at the top actually is we have made out at one of our test facilities, Mcity on the campus of the University of Michigan. We put in a test facility out there I'm sorry, a testing environment out there. It's a very small strip.

We put the coils in so that what that does is it allows us the opportunity to continue development, right, continue testing. We have left it open with the coils out there so that we can interact and change those. And then also we have some of the pictures here for a couple of the static charging, which you can see in the little one, that the small picture there that has a static charging.

So we have an area in Detroit, it's an innovation hub called Michigan Central that we've created with a lot of startups and whatnot. And we built an environment there where we have two static charging pads. And those were put in in September.

And what those can do is really look at if we have a shuttle that will operate down there, so the electric shuttle can traverse the road, it will get charging in the road, and then it can pull up on these pads and actually receive a charge while it's sitting there. It could be loading, unloading, waiting, those types of activities. The other is specific to these areas is looking at our last mile delivery services.

So if you think of FedEx, Ups, Amazon, those types of services, they come and deliver to this area so they can pull in there. They can be receiving a charge while they're grabbing the package, or going in, delivering it, coming back out. And what they've done is we're not looking to go from a zero charge to 100%. What we're looking to do is to extend their trip. So we want to give them a charge when they come and deliver or they ride over the road.

Segment that actually started construction yesterday is they will be able to receive a charge and continually extend their trip. So as we look into further development of these in installation, we have another section that will be going in. As I said, one piece started construction yesterday. We have another piece that will be about three quarters to a mile long on a different roadway, close to the proximity of this one for us. But the real logistics to that is focused on transit.

So we are working with our transit partner, which is DDOT in the City of Detroit. And we have a bus manufacturer, soon to be publicly released, but we have a bus manufacturer that we're working with to enable an electric bus and that will run in the transit lanes on Michigan Avenue when we reconstruct that. So really the pilot is giving us the opportunity to take and understand how much charge can we get with this type of charging.

We have projections of what that is, but what's factual based on the size of the vehicle, based on the speed, those types of things, how much does that change based on the weather? You just start looking at all the different characteristics. And then also, as mentioned on the last panel, part of it is to really push and use this as an environment to set the standards for this technology. So we have to get to where we have standards for interoperability.

I know here in Michigan and many other states, we do have to publicly bid projects like this out once they move beyond a pilot. So how do we create the interoperability environment where the technologies on the electric vehicles coming off the line can integrate with these coils, regardless of who the manufacturers are? Next slide. All.

Thank you. So the last slide that I have here is to bring awareness not only to the technology side that we always get excited about, especially in my space, but also to bring awareness to some of the other pieces we need to be thinking about. Touch on those real quick. We have taken the opportunity to do community outreach. Really important, super interesting endeavor that it's been so far in interacting with the public. They don't really know what the technology is.

They don't know whether to be afraid of it or not. And you can see and demonstrate in some of these pictures some of the hands on opportunities that we provided folks to actually see what's going in the ground in their neighborhoods, ask questions, gain comfort over what the technology actually is, and then also taking the opportunity to reach out to our stakeholders, understand again what's their concerns, what can we do? We're bringing this in. How does it work, how can they use it?

And being very upfront with them to say, hey, this is a pilot right now you can't take if you have an electric vehicle and ride over it. However, when we create these standards and we get that environment and through these testing opportunities is we will have those set in place. So then you will be able to use it. Whether you use transit for your commute, whether you have your personal vehicle, if you ride a shuttle to move around, everybody's scenario is a little different.

And I really strive to provide the opportunity for engagement of all of those different types. So very happy to share what we have going on here in Michigan. Pretty high level. Happy to share additional video and pictures and things like that as we continue to progress.

Thank you so much and really very much appreciate you being here. I'm super excited to see how this develops. As a big fan of Electrifying Roads is one of the important options we need for our charging needs and to remove that range anxiety that people have. So wanted to move on here to Michael, and if you can stick around Michelle, that would be wonderful. We'd love to have all the panelists speak and then ask questions at the end. Michael Samulon is the Deputy Director of Electrification at the LA Mayor's Office of Energy and Sustainability. Thank you for being here and I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you. Chair. Shiavo Assembly, Member Connolly. Good to be here. Thank you for having us on this topic, which I know everyone in this room and on this panel is very excited to talk about. So I've been doing this for eight years in the current mayor's office and the previous so really been able to see things grow. And it is exciting just to see where we are today. Mark mentioned one out of four cars. It's pretty unbelievable. We were touting one out of 10 just two years ago. And one out of 15 three years ago. So really exciting. Yes, it works.

So I think it's helpful to have a little bit of an understanding. How does this work locally? What are we doing on the ground here in a city? So I'm going to provide the perspective today from what's going on in Los Angeles where the rubber meets the road. We've been taking a sort of two pronged approach to electrification over the last decade or so. Basically a lead by example path and then what we're doing externally.

So we expect that we cannot ask others to do something that we, the municipal government, are not willing to do. So that means we've been electrifying our fleet, we've been electrifying our buses. We've helped launch an EV car share program. Blue LA. I'll talk a little bit more about all these things in a moment. We're putting in public charging at our municipal facilities and then, of course, trying to help our employees go electric where it makes sense, and putting in chargers at our city facilities.

On the public side, we have the wonderful tool of a municipal utility. And you'll hear more from Emil, so I won't spend too much on it, but he has generously given out millions and millions of dollars for rebates and incentives. We're very thankful for that. And we know that it's gone a long way to getting infrastructure charged installed throughout the city. We're forever working on permit streamlining.

Know that the system isn't perfect, know that there's a lot of friction and always things we can do to be improving. So we like to hear from our stakeholders in industry and those who are on the end of permitting and development so we can improve. We have a class leading building code here in Los Angeles. It's actually, as far as I know, the furthest reaching in the country. We now require a minimum for multifamily residences, 1240 volts outlet at a minimum for each dwelling unit.

So That's new construction, it's obviously only going to work on what's newly being built, but got to start somewhere. We're doing a lot on public charging. I'll talk a little bit more about that directly and of course we're trying to enable more of that. We have several targeted working groups on TNCs, Uber, Lyft, things like that, to make sure they're able to go electric and maybe even speed up the 2030 deadline for them. And medium duty, heavy duty freight goods movement working group.

And then just recently, this year, DWP also put out a grid capacity map, which is huge for developers. This is updated quarterly, I think. And maybe Emil will talk a little bit more to that as well. Tremendous help for the development side. So, you know, where can I do this quickly? Right? Where is the Low hanging fruit? And then utility rates and other programs that you'll also hear about from DWP. So visuals speak more than my monotonous voice so here the municipal fleet.

We've got over 1500 vehicles in it so far. We have a fleet of over 20,000 pieces of equipment, so there's a long way to go. And I think municipal fleets are very interesting because they represent the hard case. We're doing our sedans. That's not a problem. That's doable. But you can see some of the more specialized equipment here we have North America's first electric fire engine there in the middle of the screen. We have an electric street sweeper there at the bottom.

That's actually a mini sweeper for bike lanes. And we actually also have the first full sized electric sweeper in our we just started testing out recently, and we're going to be ordering several of those soon. You can see an F 150 lightning. We tried to get them as soon as we could. I also just took a ride in a Chevy Silverado EV the other day. So we want it when it comes out.

We're trying to do it with our own fleets, and the way we've been able to do that is with a zero mission first procurement policy. So before it was clear how the technology is going to work, we said, all right, well, 50% of your new vehicles need to be electric and or zero mission. And we've moved from there to great success. There's always resistance at first, but people eventually come along once. They just drive it once or twice. Electric buses.

This is one of LA DOT's electric dash buses. They have 44 of these running in the system right now, another eight or so that will be coming online imminently in the next few weeks and about another hundred or so that will be coming into service over the next year. Getting charging in the ground is definitely the hard part.

And as we move into this medium and heavy duty equipment, finding the power, being able to move it where you need it to be, these are the real complications. Another big program for us is our Blue LA, powered by Blink Mobility EV car share program. And this is a wonderful example of public private partnerships. So we have an operator, Blink Mobility, and then the program itself is sponsored by the city and of course, CARB, which has generously funded it on several occasions.

So this is bringing electric and zero emission mobility into Low income neighborhoods. So far, the 40 stations we have are all located in high calendar screen areas. I believe it's 85% or above on the calendar screen. So we're making sure that these are going into places that, one, that are burdened, and two, that typically don't have access to a lot of zero emission mobility right now. So the program is great. People like it. It has its challenges. Vandalism is real.

I'll be talking a little bit more about that. But we're launching a phase two. We're going to build another 60 stations and put out another 150 vehicles again, just quickly, public and employee charging. This is an example. It takes a lot to get it done, but once it's there, people use it. I can tell you, it really does work. When we opened up our big city municipal parking garage in 2019 with about 80 chargers, it was not full every day the pandemic hit.

That obviously had its own effects. But I can tell you, if you don't get in by 730 or eight now, you're not getting a charger. It's over. It's too many EVs. A really exciting one here is our curbside public charging on our street lights. So this is an example of sort of smart cities benefiting one intervention benefits another intervention.

We went ahead and over the last 10 years converted all of our street lights from the old high consuming, metal halide, high pressure sodium lights to LEDs that freed up capacity on the circuit. Now we can put chargers in on those street lights. We've got about 700 of them installed. Now. Again, they come with all the challenges of putting something in the right of way. So there's a significant amount of vandalism. Theft is real.

Copper theft is real, even though there's not a lot of copper in them. As Alyssa was saying earlier, sometimes it's just getting the supplies that we need to fix them, more than the ability to go out and fix them can be a challenge. I want to highlight something really interesting here from the consumption of these chargers. So this is average kilowatt hour consumption per week across the fleet of chargers since about mid 2019. You can see there's a huge spike.

That's when we made it free during the first year of the pandemic. People like free stuff. They're very fair. It's just basically the cost of a parking meter. So it's not very expensive. But in any event, you can see over time, as we've added more and more people have gotten EVs, the actual per charger consumption is going up. And very interesting to me, I just saw this data for the first time yesterday. In the last five months, it's really spiked.

So we were sort of hovering at around two to three times more consumption than 2019. And now we're at six times the consumption on average from 2019. Very quickly, just to wrap up some DWP programs, like I mentioned, they've spent a lot of money. I won't belabor this since Emil's here the phenomenal grid capacity map That's out there. Really helpful. And then just lastly, some of this other stuff we work on that I mentioned. I'll stop with just a couple of statistics.

So reiterate what Mark said so we can pat ourselves on the back. 25% of the vehicles being purchased right now are zero emission. That's tremendous in the city's total fleet, Just City of LA, which is not about maybe 1.6 million vehicles, we're at about eight or eight and a half percent of the total fleet. Has been converted. So while we've done so much, we have 90% to 92% of the job to do, and That's just for the light duty fleet. So I really want to say that for everyone who's here and all of us who are working on this, we do have a lot of work to do. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Michael. Wonderful to see the work and really investment that the city is making to be a leader in this issue. Emil Abdelshehid. I wanted to turn it over to you, the Assistant Director of the Power New Business and Electrification Division at the LA. Department of Water and Power. Thanks for being here.

Good morning. Thank you for having me here. And the Department of Water and Power sees itself as that bridge to the customers. We have that very unique opportunity to not just interact with the customers as a city Department, but also provide them an essential service that makes electric vehicles and electrification possible. Not just do we make it possible, we have to go beyond just providing those electrons to the customers.

We recognize that in the City of Los Angeles, an average two income household can see a significant reduction in their overall household costs simply by buying or owning an electric vehicle. We see that having an electric vehicle across the City of Los Angeles continues to put a downward pressure on our rates, which positively impacts all of our customers. And bringing EVs into the grid is going to cost our customers less over the lifespan of the vehicle than having an internal combustion vehicle.

In addition to all that, the interconnection of these technologies, whether they be battery, energy, storage, vehicle to grid, or various technologies that support electric vehicle electrification, require the utility's interaction with the utility to get that infrastructure interconnected. In addition to seeing from a customer perspective, we also have the opportunity to see it on a broader scale. Whether it's supporting the Port of Los Angeles, one of the largest ports in the United States. Electrify its equipment.

Looking at various delivery and drage trucks electrification projects as well, which is another big push That's going to come here in the very short term, and also looking at our other city departments, our county, and those public service areas that are looking to electrify. Our role in making that possible is very critical and a critical path. And so we definitely recognize that.

As Michael mentioned, over the last several years, since 2018, we've put about $115,000,000 in rebates made that available to our service territory in various forms, whether they be through residential rebate programs for a simple level two charger, or through commercial rebates for workplace charging multifamily dwelling units, and also to help families buy electric vehicles. We have a used EV rebate program as well.

And so we do recognize it's not just about the charging, it's also about getting those vehicles in our ratepayers'hands in the citizens of Los Angeles'hands. And over the course of that time, we do have some very aggressive electrification goals in terms of chargers. And so a lot of these Rebate programs are really helping us achieve some of those goals. 120,000 chargers in the City of Los Angeles by 2030 is one of those goals.

And having 3000 of those being DC fast chargers across the city, is that going to be enough, the way things are going? Probably not. We probably have to look at more aggressive goals to help us really support bus electrification, public transportation. We have the Olympics coming in 2028. Part of the World Cup is going to be in the United States, and so we really have to look toward those things and set the example for electrification. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you. And thank you for your support to really help make this transition happen. Dr. Stevie Ruiz is an associate Professor of Cal State Northridge. Happy to have you here and happy to be in your home area home zone here to talk about the work that you're doing.

Thank you for inviting me. And I feel like a bad teacher because I didn't send my slides in on time. So if you see that slideshow, That's fine. I didn't meet my deadline, so sorry.

That's okay. Do you have it to give?

Yeah. So I have a couple that are going around. They're circulating, so the audience will see.

Okay.

And you have a set of slides in front of you that I'll be going with. Or you can go to the next page at least. Is there's an image of kind of three sets of freeways? It's a 100 and 110 in Pasadena. Through San Pedro. Into Pasadena. One of the things I always like to start is to give a little bit of background about the history of infrastructure when it comes to our move from public to private owned vehicles.

And one of the things I don't have it, but I have my slides in front of me, but it's on Canva. No worries. But one of the things that I think is important is to talk about the transition from public to private operating vehicles. And the reason why is in the 1970s, we did have an opportunity to turn to investing in more of in our public sector.

So I'm so glad that you're here because that conversation was a divestment that intentionally happened and it was driven by manufacturing companies. Private operating motor vehicles was a fairly new phenomenon. Most people got to work using public transportation, but we decided to invest as California into our freeway system. This has had devastating impact on communities of color till this day because all those pollution burden indexes that you were referring to are caused by freeways. People are breathing in the dirtiest, air quality.

And I'll just give an example. People that live off the 118 in the City of San Fernando have an index between 90% to 95% on the Cal Enviro screen. What that means is that that community breathes in and takes in the burden of 90% that other Californians don't. So that just gives you a kind of index. And then in addition to that, because of the impact of climate change, we've also seen that those communities have the least tree shade density.

So this is actually what people have called shade equity because children literally cannot go outside anymore because of the fact during the summer months or even during the early part of the fall to go out in school, in the schoolyard. So we've been actually engaged in a grading campaign as well. But I just say that because when we're looking at all this data, I just want to be mindful of the fact the human toll and the human impact that numbers don't tell us.

And That's I think, is people's stories. And while we are intentional now, I think I want to be very intentional. This conversation about equity is a fairly new one, to be quite Frank, in the post George Floyd moment. But I think equity is not just about intention, it's about your outcomes. So we have to be tracking what are our intentional outcomes and output and how is it actually delivering to those communities that we intend to serve the most.

And I say that because we've seen, for example, in the expansion of the freeway system off the five freeway, Boyle Heights was most impacted. So we know the eminent domain, but also in the corridor of the 710 freeway where we've seen that community Members have had to fight back against Caltrans, for example, and I'll give an example in a moment just because their communities were going to be bulldozed.

But also Caltrans and I'll get into this is one of the largest real estate investors in the State of California and they were amassing huge amounts of real estate property and hoarding them for a very long time till this day. And in the event that they wanted to expand the freeway, those homes are still vacant till this day, even though we have one of the largest homeless population problems in the country. So it kind of gives you the kind of deliverables as well.

This is over a 40 year problem we've had in the City of Los Angeles. A third component, and I'll move to the next slide, is those communities that live adjacent to freeways, like I said, have higher asthmatic rates, higher likelihood of hypertension, heart failure, heart disease, and these are directly induced around environmental impact and environmental inequity. You can draw a linkage. The people that had the highest morbidity rates during COVID-19 were people that lived next to freeways.

Those two things were overlaps with comorbidities in addition to people who were houseless and living on the streets of Los Angeles. And I think That's critical in how we think of how California, especially Los Angeles, has gotten so accustomed to a freeway ecology. Now where we and this is the interesting that I think that I find so interesting as a researcher. The purpose of freeways was to get people from point A to point B in a faster manner.

But we actually found that people that live in the metropolitan LA area don't travel that far on a daily outside of work. They actually stay within their neighborhoods at a frequently more frequent and it's actually people that are going through the city as commuters. But for a very long time. With the addition of white flight and the 1980s where white communities were moving into Orange County and out to the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, we saw that was there was a greater need.

We've seen that there's been an inversion of capital interest and now people are wanting to come back to the city to reinvest. And this is why we have this resurgence of interest around how do we accommodate that class sector. So I think it's always driven to by being mindful of why are we really interested in doing this, but what is the outcome of it, the impact of it? In addition, we've seen sizable expansion of freeways till this day.

And the continuance I'm just moving to the next slide of using freeways as a means to create or modernize the City of LA. We've seen this huge impact, but very often those communities are often black and Latino. And I'll give you one example as well, and I just mentioned this off the 710 corridor. Caltrans has been in a dispute with a community organization called Reclaiming Our Homes.

This is a group of over 13 families during the pandemic that reclaimed homes into the hands out of the hands of Caltrans. These homes were pretty much vacant. There were over 200 homes. And Caltrans had been hoarding these homes for over 40 years. And so when these stay at home orders had come down the pipeline under Governor Newsom, HACLA squared a deal with Caltrans to be able to allow those families to lease.

Those families are now facing eviction and it's all being done by the HACLA organization. So it's very important to be mindful that these entities are still at odds with community organizations. But these are the people that are most in line that I think of when I think of equity work, to be honest, because these are families, their parents, their loved ones that are people were living on the streets during the pandemic, at the start of the pandemic.

I think those are the people that we should be most responsive to because those are our Members, our community Members that we serve. And at least here at CSUN, the students that we serve come from those backgrounds.

I do want to end by giving an example of there's an article that came out in 2023 by Re Placa and Laura Diaz, and I really commend the private public partnerships, but I think one cautionary tale I think that has come up is this private public partnerships and what happens when things don't go according to plan. And I think we saw that in the Encantua Creek in San Joaquin Valley, there was a set of EV charging stations that were set up for four of them.

And this happened in November of 2019. What happens is, I think it's called green commuter and CARB Co-Partnered with one another and that basically when the pandemic hit. They divested from that car sharing program when community Members needed it the most to get to the hospital. So I think it's so important for us to be very cautious too with these private public partnerships.

And CARB and Green commuter ended up vulturizing each other in the media and blaming one another because they said, well, you had a business model. No, you did. So at the end of the day, the community Members got screwed over. And so I think it's so important, and that image I show of the Kentua Creek residents, Julia Mendoza and Blanca Gomez, I put that there intentionally because I think it is important to understand that this community is 100% Latino.

They are squared in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley and there's these four EV charging stations that no one's using. So that, I think, is something That's really important for us to be mindful for. You can have EV charging stations, but if you don't have a car to use them, what's the point? Especially if you can't eat or you can't get to the hospital or your immediate, your basic needs.

And we're seeing also at this moment, we are facing one of the largest inflation rates in American history, and food and food insecurity and housing crisis. So I say, I really am happy that you're here and you're talking about public transportation, because I think we need to be incentivizing people to take public who are taking public transportation and not just giving out tax incentive to the richest or the people that are the most privileged in our society. The federal government's giving a $7,500 tax deduction.

I saw that the California vehicle rebate program is giving between 1000 to 7500. So you're talking about big chunks of tax deductions, but if you're making $35,000 a year, that doesn't really matter. So I say that we should be also investing and being mindful of the private sector, but reinvesting in our long standing divestment of public transportation.

So, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much and appreciate that you're bringing in the big picture and why we're all doing this work in the first place. So I want to thank everyone for joining us and for your testimony and would love to open it up to questions, turn it over to my colleague if he wants to.

Thank you. Fantastic panel, I'm sorry.

And just really quickly, if Alyssa wants to come back up in case there's any more questions that you want to chime in on? And everyone who's on Zoom can chime in as needed as well.

Yeah, and I'll try to direct questions to folks, but anyone else can chime in as they desire. First question to Michael. Very interested in a lot of the innovative things LA is doing. One is street side charging and wondering if you could talk a little bit about exactly how that works. Does it mean charging stations would be built in proximity to street lights? How many zero emission vehicles can be charged at one time? Kind of some of the details as you're looking at that.

I will do my best with the technical stuff. I am a policy person and I have a wonderful bunch of colleagues in our departments who do the installs. But here we go. For our Bureau of Street Lighting chargers, like I mentioned, those are tapping into a street light. They are accessing the available capacity that was made available by the conversion of the lamps to LEDs. You can fit one of those per circuit.

So That's roughly five to 10 lights, depending on the neighborhood and basically how old it is. So it's limited. That means you can't really, on the street lights, put more than one charger, sort of on a block, maybe every three or four blocks, you could potentially fit one in. There's a bunch of other filters that mitigate where those chargers can go as well that relate to curbside access, Ada spaces, peak hour lanes, things like that.

So out of the 220,000 street lights that the city has, definitely at a maximum, maybe 10,000 are viable for chargers, right? To give you a sense, and it's probably less than that once you put in the other filters. But from an electricity vantage point, it's probably about 10%. We do have other streetside charges for the Blue LA program and those we are usually coordinating off five parking spaces together. There's a whole bunch of civil work that goes into it.

Digging up the street, getting to the utility, installing whether it's hardwired data or cellular, depending on the provider, and doing all of the other permitting that is required to do those. So we actually have a sort of example of a really easy program and a really hard program. So the street lights is phenomenally easy. With one crew, we can do two, three, four installs per day. So once the engineering is done, they can just go out and hammer them out. It's really straightforward.

And That's because there's no permitting and there's no civil work. They just get strapped right onto the charger. Very straightforward. And then when we put in other chargers there on the curbside, when you're digging up the sidewalk, all level of complications. You never know what you're going to find, right? We hope to have the best map of underground utilities that are the most accurate one. But there's old stuff out there. You.

Start digging around and zero, here's a pipeline from 100 years ago and just things of that nature. So the curbside work is quite challenging. And I have heard this, I can't confirm this, but I've heard that it's about three times more expensive than doing the work on private property. So yeah, I would love to see the market come along with solutions and I don't think That's the end of this conversation. That's just where things are right now.

So curbside in Los Angeles is we are working on a permitting process right now. Everything that we have curbside we're involved with. So we're a partner on it, but we would like to figure out how to make it available to others to come in to install chargers where they want. It could be for car share programs or other sort of public transit opportunities. TNCs, taxis, things of that nature, freight. There are a lot of situations and scenarios in which curbside charging makes sense. So we're investigating and would like to find more opportunities now.

It's really exciting to see kind of capitalizing on existing infrastructure as charger stock fans. Curious if you could speak to how the city is thinking about upkeep and repair long term. Are there overlapping mechanisms with the street light upkeep as an example?

Yeah, the $1.0 million question, how to keep the chargers up and running or many multiple, multiple millions of a dollar question. So we're definitely for the chargers that we run and maintain, we do experience a high level of issues, cord cutting and other stuff that does require maintenance. So where we can we are trying to keep we're trying to keep spare parts around. But like, the whole industry is maturing and expanding and scaling up. It's not always possible to have everything that we need. Sometimes the supply chain is bringing stuff from overseas that complicates it. It gets on many weeks or months of delay. So That's a challenge that we're trying to learn and improve. We're very hopeful for the CEC and CARB standards and the Nevi standards that are coming into effect around Uptime and sort of software reporting and things like that to sort of overall lift the industry and help us with our equipment and help the other folks installing chargers. And I just want to throw out there I know we always talk about 97% uptime. That's crazy. How about 99.9% uptime? 97% uptime would mean the charger is down for eight days or something like that per year. That is not an acceptable situation. So I am not asking the CEC, Mark, if you're listening to change your regulations here. Everyone don't freak out, but just I want to throw that out there. 97% seems high, but it's not. And just lastly, I think Charger help was mentioned. I'm going to mention them again because they're a wonderful LA company and story. This is another example. We need third party service and technician. We need training for that. We need to get people this is a wonderful opportunity because chargers are not just a piece of electrical equipment. There's a data component and when you marry sort of firmware software updates, electric stuff altogether, things are more complicated. So we need that sort of third party technician base out there. Yeah.

Next couple of questions to Michelle. But if others want to jump in and that is very exciting, by the way, to hear everything you're doing, particularly around jobs and just labor standards and kind of really creating opportunity as we go forward with these innovations. Many of the Federal Inflation Reduction Acts, tax incentives for clean energy projects are tied to higher labor standards. President Biden has joined auto workers on the picket line and wants more union led training and apprenticeship programs to make sure that workers displaced by the shift from combustion engine and transmission plants to EV and battery manufacturing jobs are accounted for. What can we do here in California and kind of perhaps looking at what you're doing in Michigan on these issues to ensure good paying jobs are part of our zero emission future.

So maybe just some insight, I guess, into what I will speak for myself in areas that we look at, I'll be honest. Kind of the college spaces is easier in some regard, right? Because you have a targeted audience, easier to reach out to them. We went through a period of time and probably all of us can take blame for that. Where we were touting that you had to have a four year degree and those types of things that was pretty hot topic for quite a while. That's not necessarily true. There's opportunities in a lot of spaces around the mobility environment. But really as we sit here and talk about the EV space, there's lots of opportunities where you don't have to have a four year degree. You can do a lot of these job functions without that. I think it's important that we share that information, that we be transparent in those opportunities and then also engage to educate. Right. Some people don't even know what we're talking about and we have to realize that as we sit here and we're vested in it every day. My constant thing in relation to the project, but then also with my team is to say we have to step back and we have to put ourselves in the places of people who aren't doing this every day and we have to take the time and spend the time to educate. And That's education, as I talked about in the community and different areas but also in the workforce space to allow the opportunity for them to know what opportunities there actually are reaching out to folks who are looking for job change. Right. As I mentioned in my slides is there's a lot of those people I know here in Michigan I can't speak for California, but I know here in Michigan there's a lot of people that reconsidered. A lot of people that looked at maybe the risk of the jobs they're in or just realized that they lost interest in it over the course of time. So finding and giving the opportunities for people to find their passion we found to be very valuable, again takes a lot of work. It's not easy, but connecting with the right groups, continuing to share the message, spending time in outreach activities to share that is super important. So we're never going to solve all of the challenges associated to the workforce. But I think we're making good headway in that. And I think we're actually, from a lot of feedback we get, is we're improving people's quality of life, which is super exciting, to give people a change and exposure to something that really is of interest to them. And now they have an opportunity to do it every day, all day long. So those would be my kind of word sentiments of ways to achieve that. We still have a long way to go here in Michigan but we continue to push for that and always happy to share those strategies and obviously take strategies back that other states find to work as well.

Yeah, no, it almost seems like you're in many ways front and center on the issue in terms of what some of the issues being addressed or brought up, in terms of strikes that are going on and whatnot. So there is a piece of attracting folks on these new career paths, focusing on colleges, if not high schools and the like, but folks currently in the auto industry as an example. How are we ensuring that our workforce is taken care of as we shift to an electrified economy? Will these new jobs in the sector have pay equity labor protections? To you first, but if others want to chime in from a more California standpoint, that would be great as well.

Yeah, I guess you made just a couple of statements there and let others weigh in. Of course, I think we have to really be looking at how we reposition those folks and give them different sets of tools and talents. We're not trying to take jobs. We went through this and we still honestly tackle this in the autonomous space right around freight delivery truck drivers. It's a hot topic. We're not trying to take the jobs away with the technology. One, we're trying to supplement a workforce in some cases, but in other cases we are trying to make sure that we're diligent to say we're not taking your job away from you. We are working and want to work with you collaboratively to give you the environment to create a new tool set and maybe you're not interested in that tool set, so let us help you find a different tool set. And again, we have to continue to stress that we are not taking jobs away. That is not the goal of advancing technology. The goal is to do things smarter, faster, safer. And in some regards, the technology is getting to an environment where we can take some of the risk environments our workforce is in and we can actually have technology solutions to reduce that risk and better their lives themselves. So I don't think it's just in the EV industry. We see it across the board and we see it in different areas. We have a lot going on here in Michigan right now, which I'm sure everybody's aware of and things like that. And I think the message still and always has been and maybe needs to be louder, is that we don't want to take your jobs. We're not putting everybody out of work and we have to be diligent to own that and give and make sure we have opportunities at hand to create those and educate those other tool sets for them to expand and maybe really find a new passion they never knew they had.

Yes, Dr. Ruiz.

Thank you. I really like your question. The reason why is and thank you, Michelle, as well. I was just thinking about know on the consumer end, I think about the fact I my father and all my family were immigrants and generally, if you're coming from a poor working class background. There's always this kind of skepticism of buying directly from the manufacturer. And so I love this idea like the third party. But also expanding the training I think is going to be critical, not just for people with degrees, but I think the mom and pop shops, because that gives greater buy in as well because people are working with a mechanic That's from their community and that they've established a sense of trust with, I don't think ever. And That's not to say that this ever happens. But I'm saying generally, what you see as a sentiment is that if you can work with someone, especially with an automotive vehicle, where you can always get overcharged for something, you want to go to someone that you're going to trust. And usually That's someone That's from your local community. And so it does matter that that training that you're saying, Michelle, expands outside the reach of even say this, but even the people that were just bachelors, I think we need even people that even have just a high school diploma. Because if the technical trade allows for that knowledge to be passed down and it's not so centralized into the hands of the manufacturer, then I think you'll get more buy in for EV. And that is a more equitable approach, I think, because it's not just so crunchily tight into the hands know certain groups or certain manufacturing companies.

Yeah, well put. Michelle, one more question to you. And really was struck by the EV ready communities. Toolkit. We know that so many small neighborhoods and towns don't always have the capacity for EV strategic planning. But with this toolkit, which seems like such a great idea, could you speak a little bit more about its development and if you've heard from communities that have used it?

Yeah, so currently, like I said, it's a toolkit, right? It really provides information about things they should be thinking about, really things as really came to life. We've gotten a lot of feedback when we went through and posted the request for proposals for the Nevi projects that are underway, because a lot of the folks, whether they're in a local agency or just somebody in the community, which we had quite a few of those respondents, they've never been through the processes. They don't know what to do, and then they really don't know the things that they should be thinking about. So the toolkit really answers those questions. I will say that the toolkit never replaces interaction. So we do have through that process, but then also through our normal processes where we have engagement with our local communities. So as we developed through even the connected automated space and we're now continuing that the Inductive project you saw showcased is the opportunity for our local communities to be integrated into what we're doing. So we have them with us, we have them learning with us and we have the opportunity where they can hands on, get those experiences, be asking questions, because in some cases we're learning too. But collaborating and bringing that awareness helps them to go back. And for one, they can visualize what we're even talking about. Two is start to think about how does that impact within their local areas, not only on the infrastructure side, but again on the community side. And things they can be doing, whether outreach activities, things like that. To educate their communities in different ways. But then also as they look forward to start installation, potentially go after grant funding they know and can kind of have this toolkit checklist type thing to say. These are the things. So they're not forgetting a million dollar item or a $250,000 item. And more importantly, so they're not forgetting that once you get the hardware in, the more expensive, harder part comes, which is operations and maintenance of those systems. And that is growing even harder with the EV environment because as we, I think mentioned earlier was it's great to put all the stuff out there, but if you don't have the reliability to the users of that, they're not going to be believers and they're not going to invest in the technology. So we have to have ways to ensure that the installations that are being put in are being kept up and that they are. We've seen some recent pictures of some deployments in other areas where they didn't look at somebody with a disability trying to access those charging stations. They didn't look at the potential, even just something as mirrors, a trip hazard right. With a cord strolled out across a walkway and things like that, where these are things that we want to bring forward so that as they're planning and designing and things like that, they're taking all of these into account.

Thanks. Mill, one question for you. We know that a lot of the conversation at the state level has focused on investor owned utilities. You're coming more from the muni standpoint. Could you share any unique perspectives from that standpoint in terms of the path toward electrification? Is there anything the state could be doing to further support municipal utilities in those efforts?

Sure, thank you for that question. I think that the partnerships we have with the state are going to be vital to pushing out electrification statewide and more importantly for us, in Los Angeles. And one of the key areas that we constantly get feedback on is the availability of utility infrastructure where people need it to deploy charging plazas or where they want to electrify. And I think That's going to be a key point of support that we can get from the state in order to help accelerate that deployment. Additionally, the new technologies that are going to be made available that also reduce the capacity demand from these various electrification projects is going to be critical. And so looking at managed charging policies for various companies to come in and use this technology to reduce what they need from the utility, therefore accelerating the process of getting those projects electricity and in service and ready for the citizens and the ratepayers. And also looking at the new technologies that are now really becoming part of the electrification, like the vehicle to grid technology That's going to be critical down the road, how that becomes incentivized, how people can now monetize their large batteries that are moving across the city in order to provide support for the local grid is going to be. So, in addition to all that, as Michael was mentioning, getting this infrastructure in place requires collaboration across agencies, whether it's at the county level or even just within our own municipality at the local level. And so increasing that collaboration, making that a necessity in order to accelerate electrification is going to be important. Whether it's from the state level or the local level, it's going to benefit us all and it's critical to getting these projects online quicker.

Appreciate it, Dr. Yes.

Sorry, Emil. This is a problem that I always have when I'm working with Emil and his colleagues that we run into, which is the investor owned utilities are able to rate base all of their electrification costs. So great, we're going to put all this money into electrification cool. You end user are going to pay for that, right? And they get to put that into their rates. Emile and DWP SMUD, they can't do that. That's not allowed by the way the rules work. And so it becomes very challenging when they're planning, they know where it's coming, they have a sense of where a bunch of charges are going to have to go, right? zero, there's an Amazon delivery warehouse here, zero there's Athens or Waste Management truck calling yard here or whatever it is. These fleets that are going to need megawatts and megawatts of power. The utility is not allowed to go out there and proactively upgrade that service until there's technical details here that I'm not going to be able to explain. But they basically can't go out and do a bunch of upgrades because no one yet has asked for the service. So we have this chicken and egg problem where we know the demand is coming, but they're not allowed to go out there and pre do the work. So I think the state could look into that to see maybe it's the CEC, maybe something where there might be a little bit of help there. Sorry, I just couldn't lose that moment.

I'll just add that as well that we did hear that during our energization roundtable that support for the municipal own utilities and community choice aggregates are also going to be important. We also do have a San Joaquin Regional office and while there is some federal funding available for utilities, the perspective that we've been hearing in some of these areas is it would be difficult for some of the more rural areas or for the San Joaquin Valley to compete against the cities for that federal funding. So without there being some sort of supplement, it'll be challenging for the state as a whole to benefit from the funding available at the state level, which is often capped for California.

Dr. Ruiz, final question for you. For the moment and taking it broad, I was really struck by your earlier testimony that with the benefit of hindsight, we know that a lot of the transportation decisions that were made in the around highway construction in LA and elsewhere we now know have had disproportionate and even catastrophic impacts on communities in terms of equity and other measures. And those continue to this day. So as we embark on this new future, putting our future hats on 50 years from now, with the benefit of hindsight, you started to touch on this, but what do you see as some of the pitfalls that are emerging or some of the challenges that could have similar consequences if not addressed for underserved communities?

Yeah, I think one of the things that when I think of that San Joaquin station, I always wonder if we would reread that as potentially if there was a surge potentially in five years. And it's actually just a pit stop for people getting from San Francisco down to LA. And That's one of the concerns I have is if we start putting these EV stations in communities of color, are they just stop stations to service people that are getting from San Francisco to San Diego? And I don't know if the data really accounts for that. We don't know who is using the EV charging stations and that has a lot to do with some of the data is coming from the city and some of the data is not desegregated. I mean, the data doesn't show us who is actually using it. Are they coming from the communities that we see are in environmental justice, we have a term called frontline communities. Those are the communities that are most impacted by climate change. So those are people that are on the front lines of wildfires disasters. We've seen that the escalation of climate change is getting worse and worse. But I would say one of the pitfalls is not over celebrating too much because and I always feel like the Debbie Downer, but someone's got to do it. But I do think that I would say some of the pitfalls is when we lack an interest in actually speaking to the community and checking in with them. And That's so critical. I think as a community organizer, I'm not just a Professor, I also work with the community as well and I'm a climate justice activist. And so I think one of the key things is the community always is saying, well, we hear this celebration on one end and on the other end we get hidden in the background and That's not useful because from an equitable approach. It should be about the deliverables, what is actually coming out of this. And so if we kind of over celebrate, I think we hide things very easily. The second thing I would just say a major challenging pitfall is I think that we've over relied, I think on incentivization through these programs, through tax deductions. And I think that there could be a way of still doing EV, but also being able to meet people where they're at, which is the work of equity, seeing where people are at right now. And I think that means that maybe the state developing some type of incentive program for those that are taking more public transportation because those are actually the people that are in frontline communities. They're taking the bus to get from point A. And one successful program that has come out most recently is the Dollar program. And there's a new program the city has created in certain neighborhoods I wish it'd be expanded. It's called Micrometro and it allows people to use an app and it meets them at a local district and takes them to a closer place. But that thing is being used widely in poor communities, communities of color. And I think that type of model of program, if we were to expand into EV, I think could be really useful. I just feel like we just have to have greater communication, outreach and meeting also people in different language barriers. We're a very diverse population in California and so things need to be in multiple languages as well. So those are the kind of things that would see not as Pitfalls, but things that we have to do.

Thank you. So to kind of follow up on that idea, what is, how are, I know you were talking about in Michigan, Michele, about the community outreach that you all are doing. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about how that works. And also if panelists here can talk about how is that interaction happening with the community and actually engaging and hearing from the community on their needs.

Yeah, so a couple of examples is that one, we held a project public meeting so they could come in and just like a normal road project public meeting, we talked about the road reconstruction was going to be done, but then we had areas that looked at the inductive charging. So in some of the images on the slides, I think some human interaction there, we had the actual Electreon had given us some coils to use and then also a receiver.

So we took those to the public meeting. A little bulky, but we took them and they were a hit. We had tons of comments that the community really enjoyed being able to touch and feel per se of what those were and get insight into exactly what it is that's being put under the ground because once it's installed they can't even see it, right? So really allowing them the opportunity, engaging with them for questions of concerns.

I get a lot of questions, believe it or not, of things. Something if I walk my dog, are we going to stand my dog's hair on edge? At first I was like, oh my gosh. And then I stood back and I said, well jeez, these people don't even know what it is we're doing. So of course they're concerned. So I think really understanding, listening to them, not dismissing their concerns of their children or their dogs or themselves and then how is that relate to, I should say, finding ways to relate to them this technology comparatively to something that they use already. A lot of it is like a wireless phone charging device that a lot of people have next to their beds now instead of plugging their phones in.

Not exactly the same, but pretty close, where you can at least get them in an understanding to connect to something that they already know and possibly use today. So we do that. We also go to a lot of the groups where we're putting or a lot of places we're putting this in actually already have neighborhood groups that meet in different areas. So we actually go to their meetings. We get 10, 15 minutes on their agenda.

Do not start talking in a bunch of technical words and all of that. Really go there, share with them, communicate with them, and introduce ourselves so that they can place a face with who's doing what and give them the comfort zone and create that environment for them to be asking those questions. I've gone out and met people and had coffee, sitting and walking and just sharing at the project level exactly what we're doing.

So really it's about just opening your ears, focusing on the concerns of the communities, educating them, and just really truly believing in your heart the reasons that you're doing it, and bring the passion into that so that they feel it. They want to be part of it. Not everybody's going to always be supportive of it, but if we find the proper ways to engage with them and we're listening to them, they're much more receptive to hear what we're saying.

And then the other piece to this is we created a video, just literally had off the press for a couple of weeks, and it's an animated video, but really puts into perspective from a very simplistic terms how this charging infrastructure and the road is going to work. Again, keep the technical stuff out of it. The people, they don't care. So that's been popular. We have a website where people can go. We're creating an FAQ document where it answers all these questions that we're getting.

They can have it as a resource to understand the environmental impacts. And the last thing I'll leave you with for that is finding credible sources, right? So if we tell somebody it doesn't affect your pacemaker, are they going to believe me? I'm putting in the system, right? And I want the system and I'm promoting it. And I think it's a great thing. So am I the trusted source that they are going to invest in believing? Maybe, but maybe not.

So if we can get credibility to the statements that we're making in relation to the safety of the systems and things like that, the people are willing to listen. So we've had great success doing that. We've gotten great feedback from our communities that they feel that they're being listened to and they feel they're being part of. But we're investing in those opportunities and taking them very seriously.

Others yeah.

So the Department, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is very much ingrained with the communities and also in this idea of the equitable transition to a cleaner environment. And so we put together over several years, with the help of various federal organizations, research labs, academia, and community-based organizations, we've come up with several options on how we're going to move forward with this, with our plan to be carbon-free. And part of that is how do we do it equitably?

And getting feedback from the various community-based organizations was key. And as it applies to electric vehicles and electrification, knowing that that's such a big part of that overall strategy to a cleaner environment, how do we directly impact those areas, those communities that may not have access to this? A lot of what we do comes from those grassroots discussions that we've had.

And one key example of that is we've increased our Rebate program for those customers that are on our low-income households by about 60% to help them afford electric vehicles. And from an educational perspective, we've also taken a lot of that feedback in changing our rebate programs to meet the needs and the gaps that were identified by these different organizations and these different communities, such as. Many of the houses in the State of Los Angeles are 100-plus years old.

Some of them aren't electric vehicle-ready. So how do we support those families that want to buy an EV and want to charge at home? And so looking at different rebates to allow panel upgrades and things like that are items that we are going to be looking into and implementing near term to help accelerate that. So understanding what the community is seeing, being ingrained, and also education.

We constantly are part of the different community events and as the different themes throughout the year continue to play themselves out, the different community events are great forums where people gather and we can share information. The LA Auto Show is going to be coming up another big opportunity for us to educate and present information, non-technical, you know, very straightforward on where the world is in terms of electric vehicles and how you can benefit from it.

Also note that as the representative from Michigan noted, the experience is really important. We've had great success with the medium and heavy-duty side of having ride and drives where you don't just see the vehicle, but you can also hear, or rather not hear how loud it is. The off-road equipment as well. We also had this year participated and helped with the investor and utilities run a tribal engagement summit where we also had pieces of equipment and vehicles there that you could actually interact with.

So it's one thing to just hear about them, but being actually able to test drive these vehicles I think is an important part to helping operators. So not just those that might own the infrastructure, but those that may also operate the vehicles to get accustomed to how it might be. There's less vibration for these medium heavy-duty vehicles. You don't have the direct pollution from operating them.

And then many of these independent owner-operators are going to come from diverse backgrounds, different languages, and they may not even own their vehicle. So what does it look like for them to transition I think is something that we're also still learning and also making sure that the benefits are actually seen as being beneficial to the community. Growing up in the desert, I was really interested to see all of the solar panels being brought out.

But when a bike lane was installed next to a solar panel in the middle of nowhere, I was very interested to see how that engagement with the community might have been. So I think the questions that we ask in some of these programs as well, the competitive programs, how is it benefiting the community and how do you know that the community sees it as beneficial is also an important aspect.

Absolutely. I think that last one is a really important question. One of the things, Michael, that I have been hearing from, and I don't know if you can speak to this or not, so I'll leave that up to you. But from charging companies, charger companies is the challenges around permitting and delays on getting chargers installed. And I wonder if you're looking at that at the city level, are there efforts to try and figure that up or upscale? Because it seems like right now it's less than it will be in the future. It's just going to be more and more demand. And so how are we going to kind of keep up with that and address that?

Yes, permit streamlining, the forever problem. Bureaucracy is real. We don't have all of our systems online yet. And I think there's a plan for something called BuildLA where all of our development services will eventually there will be an integrated platform basically online. So today, if you're a developer, you literally need to get an expediter, because they're the one who understands. First you're going to go to this building, then you're going to go to that counter, then you're going to talk to this person, and then you're going to go back to the other person after you got the first thing checked. So that's real, that's a complication. And I do try to remind my colleagues in our city departments who work on this stuff that the regular developer or the human coming in off the street doesn't care if you're in DBS.

They don't care if you're DWP. They don't care if you're the Bureau of Engineering. You're the City of LA, period. So, you know, not to sort of take a note from the private sector, but we need to be more customer-oriented, a little bit more customer-facing. And we have done a lot, so, you know, I'm going to credit Emil here who's done a tremendous amount over at DWP on their piece of the puzzle, making sure that there is a dedicated EV group so that when you start doing your electrification planning, you're dealing with people whose bread and butter all day long is vehicle electrification. Do they do building electrification also?

Yes.

Okay, so it's all electrification. But anyway, they're focused. These are the things they do. And similarly now at the Department of Building and Safety where you're going to go and get your electrical plan check or your building permit and things like that, they also, it gets flagged if it's an EV project and you've had the right word in there and said abracadabra, it goes into the EV group which should theoretically help you there as well. Now, what's lacking for everyone here is sort of the transparency there, right?

How do you don't know about that except that I just told you. So we do need to do a better job of communicating these things. And the AB 970 requirements, or example, around a day permit, the plan is complete or not, and then 20 days to actually review. My understanding is that we are coming close to that, but when I do speak with developers, I'm hearing not so much, right? So then, okay, well, I'm getting this data over here from the departments and this over there. So it's a constant feedback loop. We want to be told what's wrong. We are open to hearing it and apologies when we're slow.

Let me add on to some of the things that we're trying to do and doing in order to help expedite, not necessarily the permit process, but just the end goal of getting your services online. As Michael mentioned, the capacity map was a big part of accelerating that or at least educating folks on what is available in their immediate neighborhood based on where they want to develop. And that's, I think, been a big piece of information that we were constantly getting requests about.

We also offer the opportunity to do a more in-depth feasibility study before your project is ready. That gives you a lot more information, takes a little bit of more time, but it gives you a lot more information which more information you have up front, I think the quicker your process is going to be at the end. And then also I think we want people, developers, teams, projects to come in before submitting anything.

Because if you've submitted something that may mean you may be already a little too late. Things will get once requirements change or you're aware of new information that could drastically impact your project schedule. So coming in and understanding those requirements off the bat, we have seen and believe is going to be a key driver to expediting projects, cutting that project lifecycle considerably.

Okay, great. Yeah. I mean, I just imagine folks who are individuals coming in, trying to get them installed or going through companies trying to get them installed and then multifamily, maybe apartment owners and things like that, who are trying to be proactive and do the right thing, but not familiar with navigating this whole system, needing some support to do that too. So appreciate your improving and working on it. I know it's an ever-improvement as we scale up and continue to grow.

And one more question, Michael, or maybe a couple more questions. I know you were talking about the electric buses. We actually saw those being built yesterday up in the AB as well, and saw them getting ready to come on down to LA, which is exciting. And I heard you mention kind of figuring out charging. The city is not using any inductive charging or wireless charging. Is it something they're looking at?

One of the things I think about when I think of the wireless charging also is that it reduces the vandalism problems that are being experienced. And it seems like with more and more uptake in the city and so many kind of overlapping stops for multiple different lines, that having key locations where they could charge along the route would help. But currently, are they just operating shorter or being taken offline to charge or how is that all working?

So for the LADOT buses, they're fortunate in that they can domicile overnight, no problem, plug in, then they have enough to go the next day. It's a neighborhood circulator, so they do maybe 80 or 100 miles a day, go back to base. It's all good. LA Metro, which the mayor is the chair of at the moment, and we have four of the 13 members on the Board, is much more complex, 2400 or so buses, much longer average routes, much longer duty cycles, and more complicated terrain and air conditioning and all these kind of things. So I don't want to speak for Metro Ops because I am not our Metro lead, although I do have quite a bit of background on what they're doing.

But I can tell you for DOT and generally for our fleets, inductive charging, non-dynamic inductive charging. So just where you park and you're parked over an inductive plate, like your toothbrush or your phone or whatever, is definitely something we're interested in. I think in the fleet context, it's particularly interesting, especially when you start parking things sort of in multiple vehicles in a row where you can free up needing to get a human over there to plug or unplug something.

And there's just sort of free access for vehicles. I know for our buses, where it really is going to be, you're going to see them all lined up, it could be five or six rows across and five or seven, ten vehicles deep. Having inductive will be great. So AVTA up in the Antelope Valley, who've gone fully wireless and electric, are doing a tremendous service to the industry, learning a lot of lessons, and I think all of the other transit agencies will be very excited and happy to see sort of that data come out over the years. I am not a technical expert, but my understanding is that the ISO related to inductive charging is not firm or not finalized.

And so people who are installing it right now are sort of gen one, let's say, or version one, right? And they're willing to sort of get out there and test that out. There are technical issues as well. I know, I'll share this anecdote I heard with Metro. They did look into it for their bus fleet and they have a parking garage where they were intending to put them in, but it's prestressed concrete with rebar inside of it, so there was no place to put the metal pad that needs to be sunk into the ground. They just couldn't physically fit that in there. And this is a reality when you're dealing in space constraint situations. You may not have actually the place to bury the infrastructure. So I think there are going to be a lot of applications where it's viable in the future.

And I'm very excited for when all the OEMs and all the charging companies have adopted all the standards and the kinks have been worked out of the technology. I will say one thing on the dynamic charging because we have spoken with both Electreon and Elonroad I think is the other one who's making a pitch on this somewhere in Europe. It's very interesting. I'm really excited about what Michigan again taking sort of the first mover hits here and all the learning lessons and costs.

There may be fixed routes where it makes sense in the future, freight routes, but transit routes, things like that. But in a complex city like Los Angeles, finding the right locations to bury that kind of infrastructure will be complicated. A street resurfacing, you're only taking off the top two or three inches of the pavement. So it's almost you need a full street reconfiguration before you're going to have the right space within the infrastructure to put that dynamic charging. So very exciting. We are interested, we will keep tabs on it. We may run some pilots, maybe Emil over here applies for a grant and we can install something somewhere, but definitely keeping our eyes on it.

Well, definitely talk to me about pilots because I'm interested too. So I do want to leave time for a public comment and I know some folks are here to join the conversation. Just wanted to open it up to the panel. And actually, I have one just quick conversation. Michele, I'm just curious, are you because one of the things I was thinking around the inductive charging is that there's a lot of federal infrastructure dollars right now and is that helpful in any way? For example, the piece of road that you're going to be doing, is that part of infrastructure work that you would be doing anyway and you can kind of capitalize on this, or is that not coming together in a way that's financially beneficial?

Yeah, so I think it's an important point, right? I think as an owner-operator speaking, we have to be looking, one, is we're going through the pilot for a reason, right? And we're looking at the use cases associated to this technology and some of those we've talked about today. We have a great example of a use case associated. We have a lot of borders to Canada here in Michigan, real quick, one of those butts up to a lot of truck traffic, a lot of freight movement across the border so that the truck stack to get through tolls and customs, they have to continue to be slow moving. It's not an opportunity where they could plug in. So as they're slow rolling and things like that and moving, that's a great use case.

The shuttles are a great use case, things like that, where in this quick early term is to say where can this really get the advantages to the technology? And then looking as we go forward to say where do we install this? Your question as far as the road work itself, yes, both projects that we're using were set for road projects to start with and then we just implemented this and added essentially plan sheets of our inductive charging into those projects.

We did not combine the projects but we did combine them for the build process to be coordinated. So I would say from our perspective as we continue to go through this pilot, get lessons learned and things, as we look for those future use case implementations, those are the opportunities we'll be looking for. We're no different than many other states where we can't just rip up every road and put it in and we know that. But as we look forward in the future and we're planning these things, we can be proactively thinking about what are those use cases to the best advantage to the users of the system and then where do you really get the benefit for implementation of those. So we'll continue to look at that.

We do, I will say, and I have had this discussion with Electreon too and many others, is we have to solve the interoperability challenges associated to this because it's new, it's going through the same process many, many others have that's not EV related. So nothing new, but we do have to collectively come together between government, industry, and basically everybody in the space to say how are we going to create that interoperability requirement? Because every time I bid a job out beyond a pilot it's competitively bid, right?

And the only way I can do that is if I have interoperability between the systems and then the users need to know that, hey, when I go over this roadway I'm going to be asked if I want to receive a charge. Maybe I'm at 95% and I don't need one. So I don't want to do that and I don't want to receive that and I want to pay for that. And maybe they're at 25% and they need to get just enough charge to make it home or make it to a meeting or things like that where they choose to take those opportunities. And I would continue to push folks to think way beyond and say how can this technology enable the opportunity for somebody to maybe get additional charge than what they need to get home and then they give back to the grid at maybe a potentially higher pay rate in return.

So, lots of innovative thinking, probably many years out. But we have to continue to be visionary and we have to continue to be innovative to come up with what does that future and what do those solutions look like. And can people actually use this to do other means outside of just charging their car to actually solve other challenges that they have for their quality of life.

Thank you. And just any closing thoughts from the panelists that you want to wrap up with?

Just wanted to quickly note some recent research that our clean fuels and infrastructure team did as well that's published. It's called a Phasing in Infrastructure Report. It's available on our website, calstart.org. But it also envisions sort of a model of how can we phase in infrastructure deployment around corridors and hubs across the state, where industry and freight is located, where there may be more grid capacity, and where there can also be more of these public private partnerships. So that might be an additional report that might be interesting.

Thank you.

I think the continued partnerships with public agencies, with our customers, and using the resources that we have will continue to help expand the opportunities for new technology. I believe we had a new inductive charger installed at the Port of LA as a result of some of the funding that we provide them. So we're going to continue to use our resources to get maximum benefit for the citizens of Los Angeles.

Thank you. Okay, wonderful. Well, thank you so much. So now we would love to turn it over to public comment. If there's anyone here, I think we have a mic over on the side of the room. You can queue up there. And please, if you can state your name. And I think we have time for two minutes each. Thank you.

You structure. I was the person they got to tell a lot of their feelings to. Took a lot of that to heart, and launched Charger Help in January of 2020, actually at the LA Clean Tech Incubator. With my co founder, Evette Ellis. And so we've had tremendous support from incubation programs in order for us to create our company. But really what we're looking at solving is really understanding why do charging stations behave the way that they do and why don't we know about it?

So today you may find a charging station that would show up as online and available on a platform, but when in fact you go on site, that station is not working. And so the way that we've been looking at solving this problem is by utilizing data from the field. And so one best practice that I would like to highlight is that we work with SAE International to create the first EVSC Technician certification.

This certification was put together by manufacturers from the industry to describe what does it take to be a successful technician. And from there, we actually launched the curriculum with Fort Michigan Central. They will be the first set of participants that will be doing this training program, and we'll be relaunching again with the LA Clean Tech Incubator. But the cool thing about that program is that you have folks now that understands the behavior of the station.

The second part that we're doing at Charger Help is aggregating that data in a meaningful way. So earlier this week, we hit our 18,000th field interaction. And these field interactions are very neat because what it does is really prescribes translation for what the charging stations are actually doing so we can learn, okay, this is what we saw in the field, these are the things that we did, and this is how the station was behaving, and this is what the software said.

And then we've been able to find patterns and identify different ways to be more preventative and then also ways for us to be able to help the industry understand some of the interoperability issues that we're seeing. But this brings me to one of my first suggestions or ask that we're seeking today. Most people think that their data is IP, like, all of their data is IP. So it's very hard to gain access to even just OCPP station status data.

So there is a huge opportunity there that if Charge Management Systems was more open with their data sets, you can have more companies like ChargerHelp that can utilize the field service data alongside that data to get to a better understanding of how that station is working. The last request that we have is really for us to take a moment and to really look at how have we prepared site hosts for the operations and maintenance of the charging infrastructure.

A lot of the site hosts that we work with, they received charging infrastructure for free and now, there are opportunities to include operations and maintenance cost. However, oftentimes folks do not know how much it will cost to operate and maintain a station. And so I think there is a lot of opportunity to create educational panels about the reality of charging infrastructure and how you should think about and budget for O&M cost.

And the last thing I'll say, because I like to lead with hope, Dr. Ruiz, is that we're super excited about the work that the state has done and also just EV charging infrastructure. Charging stations are IOT assets. And so as we look towards the future of smart cities, this is an incredible opportunity for us to learn how software interacts with the built environment and more importantly, for us to be able to train and prepare workers, traditional blue collar workers, to start interacting in the software space.

And the last, last thing is why we see so much hope in this. We had opened up 20 spots for field service technicians. We had 1600 people apply, and these are people that are coming from oil and gas backgrounds and other field service spaces. So folks are so excited to now work in a space where they can understand software technology and the built environment. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much.

Hi. My name is Maya Inigo Anderson. I'm with Communities for a Better Environment. We work on environmental justice issues up and down the state. But in SoCal, we have our membership primarily in the Wilmington areas and Southeast LA areas, but we also work in Assemblymember Shiavo's district. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Okay, we're working Assembly Member Shiavo's district, also in solidarity with some other environmental organizations there. And I appreciate all the references to equity today.

I also appreciate the Assembly Members making this event publicly available and us not having to come to you in Sacramento. And I appreciate Professors Reese's kind of detailed analysis of equity when it comes to public transit and some of the other topics we talked about today. My question is about charging and multifamily housing. A lot of our Members at CPE are Low income community Members who live in multifamily housing.

I happen to be an EV owner and I live in multifamily housing, and I'm lucky enough that I am able to charge. But a lot of people in EJ communities, or I should say environmental justice communities, for those who don't know the acronym, are unable to charge their vehicles or don't even purchase a vehicle if they don't think they're going to be able to charge it reliably.

So when we talk about charges in older buildings, right, we heard from LADWP that a lot of buildings in LA. Are older buildings. So how do we identify state level funding or city or county level funding to help Low income tenants financially and small scale landlords financially in some of the smaller multifamily buildings? To finance the installation of charging stations or any other kind of programs that might facilitate Low income community Members being able to have access to EVs and EV charging? Thank you.

Thank you. And we're not actually able to do Q&A during public comment, but I'm sure panelists would be happy to stick around and chat afterwards. And I know a lot of those programs were discussed today in the presentations as well. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Paul Jennings qualifying myself. I'm a board Member out here at Northridge on the foundation. Most importantly, I'm a Northridge grad, so I got a real good education. I'm also on the board of Lacey and also on the board of LA Business Council. But most importantly, I have a company that has installed 25,000 electric vehicle chargers in this state in apartments, and the vast majority of those are here in LA.

I'm going to speak granular to what these two gentlemen were saying up here. DWP is in an utterly unique position to what Michael said because we're not guided under the PUC. It's actually a total business respondent model. So when the program started about four or five years ago when we got involved, I sat down with Nancy Sutley and I'm going to address some of Dr. Ruse's point. And what Nancy Sutley, Michael, is she your Boss now, right? Okay.

So Nancy is probably one of the most well respected people in the renewable space. Her statement to me was there was about 20 million a year going into LA DWP, the EV program. Her statement was, I'm not here to put you in business. This is an opportunity for you to create a business. Take that moment in time. Today, we're still their biggest participant in the program. We put about 80% of our chargers in disadvantaged communities.

We have worked directly with Nancy Suttley and team to reallocate the program more and more into DAC at the same time we are now because LA is the most advanced EV market in the country, because we're not regulated, because they're open minded, and because they're collaborators. By comparison, we can now put an EV charger in DWP area for about 2500. It costs us another 1500 to maintain it for the next five years.

By comparison, on Edison, we've put out now about we're up to about 10,000 a year now, back ramping up with DWP. By comparison with Edison, we've only put in a couple of hundred. Now we have 15,000 in back order with Edison the Challenge. And we're dealing with really smart people at Edison and really smart people at the PUC. Again, Michael touched on it. It's a rate of return model. This was a demise of AT&T. Why do we want $2,500 cords, as we call them?

Because we know when somebody owns an EV and they can plug in every night with one little piece addition missing in our industry. And Assemblywoman Skinner is working on this bi-directionality is like having apps for smartphones because the moment all these folks in the disadvantaged communities can plug their car in and send power two ways they're the same folks that on a really hot day will have the economic opportunity.

Now stay with me here on this campus it has more EV activity than any other count in all Los Angeles. Why? Because they've installed EV charges, happens to be our EV charges. But what I can tell you this go out 10 years from now what will happen? Because all these apartments only have 200 amp panels today they can only charge five cars through technology, real time communication and Op center which gives us 99.7% uptime.

I can say that it is all coming together because once we have bi-directional, it is democratizing energy. And the fact that that person on the very bottom who has now the opportunity to go out to the desert, buy energy real cheap and bring it down here to Northridge. Because on a hot day, Northridge having 5,000, 10,000 cords here in this parking lot having people coming from all over Southern California to go to college here. They're here for hours.

This sounds like an ideal environment to create a strategic portal. And how can we do it here at Northridge? Because they got a 48K line coming out of the campus which is 34K line I rather, a 34K line coming out of the campus. So I want to leave on a very very optimistic moment that we know today EVs really cost 10 cents a minute a mile to drive.

If you cut out all the nonsense why internal combustion engine car has over 1000 moving parts, an EV has concisely 11. You don't have to be a rocket science to figure out long term which one's going to win the operating costs. So the whole future is about operating costs.

And the secret and I think often entrenched in the incumbents the fossil fuel guys and the auto industry's own, call it afraid of change is that you have the economics are here today to get transportation to down cheap accessible to many.

And just like the smartphone took more people out of poverty than any other single piece of technology in human history, I'm going to suggest, once we get our act together and it's on its way, that the vehicle and accessibility to a vehicle will take more people out of poverty than even the smartphone did. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, thank you so much for this amazing hearing.

If you can say your name and organization, sorry.

Stefan Tonger from Electron, the wireless charging company that does both dynamic and static wireless charging. So first of all and great to meet you in person, Michael. So first of all congratulations, I think to California for having such stringent goals on EV adoption. I think it's really worth noting that in the world California is a leader and has always been and it's fascinating to be living now in California to actually help the state achieve its goals on EV adoption.

And when I read this, the number of charges that need to follow is 1 million chargers by 2030. 2 million chargers by 2035. And I think you know very well that we will hit the wall if we don't think in a new and innovative way. And so thinking about wireless charging and I appreciate Michelle's presentation and comments here because it's really fascinating working in actually deploying stuff, because one thing is presentation, one thing is technology, another thing is bringing something to the life.

So all the questions you mentioned, Michael, on permitting process or the challenges of integrating technology with a mill and refill project, integrating it into concrete, developing a business model, how can we actually make use of this charging infrastructure in a new way that is more of a shared paradigm? So instead of thinking that everybody needs to have their own hose, everybody needs to have their own fueling station, we need to have our own plug, what if we suddenly see the roads as that own?

We have our roads, and where we have the common dominated roads, that where we have a lot of traffic. Can we use that road to share the charging between not only my fleet, but between different fleets in the same categories, if it buses, but also other types of vehicles? So I think this work starts by actually partnering together between the public and the private sector and see what are the barriers today with existing funding, which is level two or fuel cell or DC fast charging.

How can we get in this kind of innovative thinking? Because as I see it, this is an era where we are preparing for takeoff, and we need to learn what we can do to create this future together, where I think it will be a mix of technologies, obviously, but I think this has to play a role, and I think this can enable and help California achieve its goal to EV adoption. So thank you so much.

Thank you.

Hello. My name is Dr. Lorraine Lindquist. I teach sustainability here on campus. And I just want to thank, first of all, Assembly Member Shiavo for bringing this hearing here to campus and to you and your team for reaching out to the Institute for Sustainability to help put the panel together and all of that. We're really excited to host you here and great to hear all of the amazing speakers.

I just wanted to uplift a few things that might use a little more emphasis, I think, in what we heard today. One thing is that I had the opportunity to represent CSUN on the advisory board for the LA 100 study, which was a study that DWP conducted in terms of how to get all of our electricity generation at DWP to 100% clean energy electricity production, and resulted in the City of LA deciding to move to 100% by 2035. So That's our current goal.

The interesting thing that we found in that study is that, of course, it's going to cost money to shift over to clean electricity, but the rates actually come down the more we do electrification. So that includes both building electrification and transportation electrification. So there's amazing co benefits. Not only are we greening our transportation sector and reducing our carbon emissions, but we're actually also making things better, at least in some ways, for the rate of at least in terms of the DWP study.

And then another thing I wanted to uplift I'm so glad that we have Dr. Stevie Ruiz giving the environmental justice perspective, and I just really wanted to uplift some of what you were talking about, the emphasis on public transportation. When we look at the studies that look at how we're going to solve our climate emergency and what we need to do in terms of our climate.

Yes, we need to electrify all of transportation, but it's going to be a lot cheaper and a lot more equitable if we don't just replace all the cars that we have right now with electric vehicles. Right.

If we do a lot more of making transit accessible, making our cities better, making land use better, making sure that we improve our public transit systems, making it easier for people to get around in lots of different ways, whether it's biking, walking, taking transit, taking high speed rail, all of the various different ways that we can get around, it's a lot cheaper.

It's also just a lot less impact on the sustainability issues that do come with all of the batteries and infrastructure That's needed to try to replace all of our vehicles with electric vehicles. So just want to emphasize the interconnected nature of all of these things that we've been talking about today. And just thank all of you again and all of our speakers for this great panel.

Thank you so much and thank you for your leadership.

My name is David Bolog. I am a Member here in the 40th District. I live here. I've lived here my whole life. I'd like to talk about there's a disconnect in California. No, I'm not talking about there not being enough charging stations for the inefficient electric vehicle. The disconnect is most people that I survey have no clue who their elected representative is. This applies to people who consider themselves politically astute and have well thought opinions on political topics.

When I asked people this past week what they thought of electric vehicles in preparation for this hearing, the majority of the people see the state's directive of eliminating gas powered vehicles as a bad decision that will ultimately make us poor. Although owners of EV enjoy having them, they realize the issue with owning them. Most people know how environmentally damaging just the collection of raw materials are to the Third World.

People in the countries that mine them, such as what's happening with lithium production in Chile and the devastating effects of cobalt mining in the Congo, the health consequences both mentally and physically, the degradation to their land, the removal of farming land and the polluting of their waters. The people of this state are poor and will lose. Well as the net zero goals of 2045 and the zero goal of eliminating gas powered vehicles by 2035, local energy costs for green power production has risen.

The cost of electricity in the state significantly to build solar and wind farms that cannot be controlled, to bring electricity to the grid as needed. Battery storage for grid electricity as a solution for this is inefficient only allowing as Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has contracted with the company in Kern to bringing 300 megawatts at 3 hours a day.

Those batteries have a limited lifespan of seven years of both before those batteries will have to be replaced, causing more ecological and financial strain to not just California, but our neighbors around the world. People that can buy a car for $3,000 to $5,000 a day today and work in the gig economy to make a couple $100 a day will not have that economic opportunity in the future.

Those are applying to people that are coming up in the world and those that are trying to recover from a downfall in their own life, be it personal or financial. This will be eliminated because the cost of electric vehicles are a rich person's game. This conference addresses the issues of people being, this conference has addressed the issues of people being removed from the job because of this new direction of zero carbon. With training and background experience that these people have in the training, they'll be fine.

Such as myself. I work with an employer that would retrain me if I was removed from my job in a gas powered generating station. The costs for these vehicles are economically prohibited because you have to be in the top 20% of earners to buy one. People that resort to the gig economy, those that are starting out recon, I touched on that. But what will happen to those people? Most likely replaced by robots, and that's a shame.

So as you plan for the future with this infrastructure that very few people in the state want and most people won't be able to afford, I speak for the majority of California today that do not want this. People have decided not to speak up because they already know.

If I experienced in the last year that the Legislature won't listen to them, they have become apathetic to the point of saving their sanity by ignoring the insanity that comes from Sacramento, the unfortunate facts that it's ignoring and it won't make it go away. I do what I can to encourage people to become more involved. To understand the issues, I want to talk about some of the issues that the speakers talk about. I work with electric vehicles myself and use them in my own job.

I don't own them myself, but I do know the experience that 10 minutes of charging will does very little to charge. Depending on the vehicle, it might make a difference with a high end vehicle such as a Tesla, with their superpowered charging infrastructure. And regarding inductive electricity charging systems, they're very inefficient, as you know, from trying to use one with your phones, if you have used one.

If you can wrap it up in 30 seconds.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much. I know my colleague here has to catch a plane. Just want to thank him again for coming down and being a part of the hearing today.

Thank all of the panelists here for the work that you're doing and also want to give a shout out to my Legislative Director, Grayson Doucet, who did really all of the work on all of this and our tour that we had yesterday, which was incredibly informative for us and had some other colleagues who were able to join us as. So, you know, just want to again, thank CSU Northridge for hosting us.

Really happy to be here and engaging at such a great educational institution in my district. You know, this was really, I think, helpful to have a fuller sense of what opportunities currently exist, the programs that are really endeavoring to do good work where it's most needed, and so many innovative approaches. And I'm grateful for everyone's work. I know this is a challenging time.

Yesterday, when we were seeing 100 buses or something being built, electric buses being built, and just moved out the door, it feels a little bit like you're just trusting that the infrastructure will be there when they make it to the road, and we're kind of building the boat as we're pushing off from the dock. At the same time, it's slightly terrifying, and it's a lot it's a lot of work.

And we know that it's complicated, and there are so many moving pieces, but being able to get where we need to go means that people can get to and from work. It means that they can get home to get their kids when they need to.

And it means that they're not, like I have been in the last couple of weeks, thinking about what if I have to just pull over on the side of the road and leave my car because I'm running out of charge and there's no charger where I need it to be in between point A and point B. And for folks who are Low income, that means if your car gets towed, you can't afford to get it back.

So there's really high, I think, risk here for people who especially don't have the means to be able to afford situations like that. And That's the work that I think is really important for us to figure out. And I think your point, Dr. Ruiz, is not lost about the importance of public transportation.

I got rid of one of my cars, a family car, because I use public transportation so much when it was on time, when it was convenient, when it was where I needed it to be. And I know that if we build those kinds of public transportation systems and I really appreciate the innovation that LA is doing right now with the micro kind of transit spaces to help do that, but I think that if we build it, they will come.

Kind of a situation to help us really meet our electrification goals and meet the needs of folks in our community, which is what we're really trying to do. So, again, thank you to everyone. Thank you to folks who came and made sure that this was available for us online. And appreciate everyone in the audience for participating today and being here and excited to continue the conversation. And we officially gaveled the meeting with my water bottle top. Thank you. Thank.