Assembly Select Committee on Electric Vehicles and Charging Infrastructure

Wonderful. Thank you so much. So I think if we're ready to get the hearing started on our tech side over there. Yes. Okay. So thank you so much to everyone who has joined us today. I want to call the Joint Hearing of the Select Committee Committee on Electric Vehicles and Charging Infrastructure to order.

We are here for an informational hearing to discuss electric vehicles or EV charging and vehicles as well. And before we begin, I need to make a quick statement on providing testimony at this hearing.

We seek to protect the rights of all who participate in the legislative process so that we can have an effective deliberation on critical issues facing California in order to facilitate the goal of hearing as much from as many people in the public as possible within the limits of our time.

We will not permit conduct that disrupts, disturbs or otherwise impedes the orderly conduct of legislative proceedings. We will not accept disruptive behavior or behavior that incites or threatens violence. Just so everybody knows. So at the start of the hearing, I just want to first thank the LA CleanTech Incubator for hosting us today, hosting our hearing.

We really appreciate to be in this space and to learn more about the incredible work that you all are doing. And I also want to thank Cal Etc, the Electric Transportation Coalition in California for the tour today of the LA Auto Show. It was really wonderful to see progress that is being made.

As a mom and an early adopter of an EV, I love to see more range and faster charging. Just warms my heart. And also that the transition to NACs is happening, that some bi directional work is starting to happen.

And so we, we're seeing this technology really advance and it's really exciting to see what's on the horizon and what's already happening.

Over the past few years, the California Legislature has passed legislation designed to make electric vehicle adoption more affordable, to ensure EV chargers are accessible and reliable, and to develop our infrastructure in a way that fits the needs of our communities. That said, we still have a way to go in making EV and charging experiences seamless and enjoyable.

Imagine that, enjoyable experiences. That's the goal. And to ensure that zero emission transition is one that all Californians can benefit from and give more confidence for those who are still making the transition to EVs.

In prior hearings, the Select Committee heard from consumer advocates on the gaps in charger accessibility and shortfalls of the charging experience from cross cutting groups pulling industry and academia together to tackle technical hurdles of industry standards and interoperability. And finally, we discussed many of the underlying goals that the legislation has aimed to address.

If you look 10 years ago. You can clearly see we've made tremendous progress. Progress both through the innovation and the determination of this whole industry. There has been incredible effort both by, you know, private industry and, you know, governmental agencies that have really been trying to move this ball forward.

Our Legislature and Administration has worked hard to push this progress forward like charging reliability and making charger charging simpler and ensuring that we have transparency, accountability and industry standards to deliver real results on the important EV charging infrastructure.

But it's become more difficult to protect that progress because of the changes to federal level impact that impacts many of the policies and funding mechanisms supporting our shift away from fossil fuel based transportation.

So today the focus is not only to hear updates on how recent legislation and regulations are being implemented, but also a discussion of the future in which we face some serious federal headwinds.

And beyond the broader shifts in federal policy landscape, we also want to hear about persistent pinch points that continue to limit EV access and lessons learned from existing programs to dial in on effective and efficient ways that the state can engage to make EV adoption more affordable.

We know that affordability continues to be a top issue when it comes to transitioning over to EVs. And while our prior hearings have focused mainly on light duty and passenger vehicles, I'm excited to hear today that we're gonna be able to dive into the challenges facing transition to heavy duty vehicles and fleets.

We'll discuss opportunities including prime use cases from innovative technologies discussed in previous hearings such as inductive charging. And many people have heard me talk about my 10 hour drive from LA to Sacramento ending with my kid crying in a mall parking lot while we're charging at 10 o' clock at night.

And so, you know, it's something that I dream about to be able to drive in charge some way someday. I hope we get there.

But I'm really excited to see that there is a project moving forward here at UCLA and then the continuation of AB Transit which has been using inductive charging for quite some time to go from the Antelope Valley to San Fernando Valley and beyond.

And before we get underway with the first panel, I also want to give a big huge thank you to my staff, Franklin Porter, my Legislative Director, who's worked very, very hard as all you know, because he's been working with you on this hearing.

I am very grateful for his leadership and his work in our office has been incredible and also want to thank all of our panelists and everyone who is here today and here remotely for their testimony and their time.

We really look forward to thinking about this policy and where we move next legislatively and how California can really continue to be a leader and make sure that we continue to make progress and build upon the progress we've already made.

And so with that, why don't we bring up our first panel of speakers which I think are all remote here, our statewide overview and recommendations. Gia Vassin, I hope I said that right. And Nancy Skinner, who we all know our new Commissioner at the CEC and Michelle Buffington. And I think first we'll hear from Gia.

Yep, that's right. Thank you. Okay, I believe you all are running the slides for us, so I'll wait for that to come up. But in the meantime, so glad to be here. Thanks for including us.

And yeah, I'm going to give us a little bit of an overview of some of the work that we're doing at Go Biz, but also a little bit of the broader context which I'm sure will be some repeat information for some of you, but just so that we can level set for everybody to be starting from the same place today.

So great. I see the slides. Thank you. Next slide. Excellent. Yeah. Next slide. I'm Gia Vasin. I'm our Deputy Director for the Zero Emission Vehicle Market Development Office in the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development. Next slide.

So for those that don't know Go Biz, we serve as the as California's leader for job growth, economic development and business assistance efforts. So within that we have quite a number of different units that do different things and you can see some of the icons here on the slide.

A couple of note, of course, the Zero Emission Vehicle Market Development Office, we have an energy unit that's really focused around ensuring that we have enough power to make this transition. We have the Infrastructure and Development Bank, the I Bank which does different kinds of financing.

We have an international affairs small business that really focuses on that and many others. So the idea here is that if you, if you're a business or even you know, a government from another state or another country, Go Biz might be the place to start for us to help identify ways in which we can partner.

Next slide please. So I'm going to start a little bit big picture here. And this graphic is from the California Jobs First Economic Blueprint which really identifies the key sectors to support sustainable economic growth, growth, innovation and access to good paying jobs over the next decade.

So this was an undertaking that took a couple of years and California has been a leader in the ZEV market, both in battery, electric and hydrogen fuel cell electric technologies for more than a decade. So you'll see the red circles here. Perhaps it's no surprise then that the blueprint really in that there were 13 regions across.

There were 13 regions across the state. In 12 of those, the clean economy was identified as a key sector in their region. Six of those included specifically zero emission vehicles and six of those included hydrogen specifically. Two of them identified both. So what does this mean? This means that there is a lot of opportunity.

And so how do we capture that opportunity? And I think that that's what our aim is, to share some of that today in our sessions and to hear from the other stakeholders, stakeholders outside of government too, on how we can really capture some of this opportunity.

But I will say that our office just, you know, kind of as we're setting the table here does hear a lot, and I know my agency colleagues do too, hears a lot about the need for continued policies and incentives to keep California as a market leader.

So programs like CAFTA and Cal Competes and, you know, loan guarantees and I bank zero emission vehicle and infrastructure grants, rebates, things like that are key. Next slide, please. And part of this opportunity is around manufacturing. So this is just a quick snapshot of here we are about where we are today.

55 ZEV related manufacturing companies in the state and estimated 26,000 jobs in ZEV manufacturing and infrastructure. You'll see that at the top there, the battery manufacturing that does also include batteries used in ZEV manufacturing. So there's the question really in front of us is how do we grow these numbers even more? Next slide.

All right, now I'm going to just kind of shift back to some of our more recent Executive actions and the foundation for what's guiding a lot of the work that we're doing today. So five years ago, Governor Newsom signed his first ZEV Executive order and it set us on a path to a 100% ZEV future.

And you can read there the specifics. It also directed Go Biz to produce a zero emission vehicle market development strategy, which I'll share a little bit more about later. And we've made tremendous progress under this directive and on it on a really solid path. Next slide. I have a little. There we go. And then the world changed.

So at least our world, my world, my ZEV world changed. This past June, in response to the Trump administration's attacks on California, Governor Newsom signed the second ZEV Executive order, N2725. So what it really does is reaffirms California's commitment to the zero emission vehicle transition.

It directs five Agencies that included CARB, the Energy Commission, Go Biz, calsta and dca. We also included the Public Utilities Commission to produce a set of recommendations that can advance the ZEV market. And these were submitted to the governor's office in August.

So we're working out through the implementation of some of those and what might be the first place to start on that set of recommendations. And that was a robust process. We took public comment, we had agency input, staff expertise. It was a robust process in just 60 days. So it was fast and furious this summer.

It also directs CARB to develop new regulations if the federal approvals remain unresolved. And I'll let CARB speak to that to whatever extent they will today. And it creates compliance lists of those manufacturers that are following clean vehicle regulations. And this will sort of guide our procurement decision making. Next slide, please.

So a little bit about what my office does in ZEV market development. We are really focused around a few key areas, so state agency alignment and coordination, trying to help to be that backbone to ensure that we're coming together, singing from the same songbook, looking in the same direction.

We also hear a lot from industry coming to look to expand or establish in California. So we collaborate to really understand what are the key barriers, what are some potential levers we have, how can we collectively problem solve together to move the market forward. We provide business related support.

So we have the California Business Investment Services team that provides incentive navigation and site selection, a number of other things. And then another big area of our work is around permitting assistance.

So I will go a little bit more into that later and then really helping to navigate and provide assistance around either existing or proposed regulatory frameworks that we're in. So kind of a lot of different hats, I'd say.

We just, I like to say we're connectors and problem solvers and we try to go where we need to go to see where we can unlock things. Next slide please. So I mentioned the ZEV market development strategy. This was, as I mentioned, a directive under Governor Newsom's first ZEV Executive order and it was first released in 2021.

Now we have an update that was ready for release in January of this year and again things changed rapidly from there. So we're doing a bit of revamping and we anticipate having this released in the next, in the coming months. But you do get to see a little sneak peek.

A couple of these graphics are from that strategy. So you get a sneak peek into what's coming. And I'll just say here the good news around that and the revamping is that foundationally the strategy didn't change much, which is really good news.

It was more the context and implications in today's kind of landscape and how we need to be thinking about it. But the strategy itself is pretty solid, which I'm happy to say so it's really intended to be our North Star. And I won't spend too much time on this slide.

But the goal here is ultimately, you'll see in the graphic at the top to enable a growing and an equitable and growing ZEV market. Right. We have outcomes that we want to accomplish under that, including, you know, our health and environmental goals, our economic development goals and our kind of expansion of access to all Californians.

This market has to be built on four key pillars. Vehicles, infrastructure. We have to think about the end user, whether it's a passenger car driver or a fleet, you know, a heavy duty truck driver or whether it's support as an example. And we need to think about the workforce.

And then finally this is really built on this foundation of our core principles about how we think about market development. So equity in every decision is number one, not by accident, embracing all ZEV pathways. Right. Let's really get to there how we can. We're not picking necessarily winners. Let's let technologies move forward.

We are committed to collective problem solving. This public investments really complement the private investments in the private, both financially and sort of in innovation. And that we're really designing for resilience and adaptation because we cannot see what's ahead of us completely. And we also.

It's really aimed at providing the agencies specific objectives that they submit annual action plans around how they're kind of working towards those objectives, which it also helps us kind of organize our collective problem solving a little bit better. We want to increase transparency for stakeholders and ensure that we have lessons learned that are being incorporated.

Next slide please. So that was the first strategy, was kind of around the why and the what. And this year this updated version we added a little bit more about the how.

So this market playbook identifies the various strategies that the state uses and how we anticipate and expect those different strategies will create intermediate outcomes that we're trying to accomplish that will then ultimately unlock these longer term outcomes of having accessible, accessible vehicles, infrastructure that's affordable, that end users have what they, what they need, they can get where they need to go and that we have the workforce to support that.

So this is a fun graphic to look at that can take take a read through another time. And not every agency will deploy every strategy. Right. But it really is about this system. It's this collective effort around the system. And so we have another table in the strategy that actually identifies which of the strategies the different agencies.

And believe it or not, there's almost 30 agencies in California that touch ZEV in one way or another, which strategies they're using so that somebody can look pretty easily and see who's doing education, outreach, who's providing funding. So really helping to try to increase that transparency. Next slide please.

Another big body of work that we're undertaking right now is our zero mission vehicle equity action plan. So SB 1251 directed Gobis to create a ZEV equity advocate position. And we've had this team Member on board for about one and a half years to develop the statewide ZEV equity definition and a ZEV action plan.

So like the ZEV Market Development Strategy, the ZEV Equity Action Plan is really centered around four key areas that complement those four pillars that I was talking about in the ZEV strategy. And these are education and outreach, infrastructure, access and affordability, and workforce development. Next slide. So the work is well underway.

Just to give a sense of what the timeline is like here, we have completed and published the zero emission Vehicle Equity definition. So that's available.

And this was a robust process just to get to that point many months in the making to make sure we could capture something that could be a big enough umbrella, but that was still specific enough to be meaningful. And then Go Biz is just completed. You see that first bullet there.

We hosted a series of roundtables to solicit feedback from community Members, from community based organization organizations, tribal governments, environmental justice entities. We did interviews.

So this workshop, these workshops are really helping us to vet the initial research we did, deepen our relationships and ensure that the action plan really speaks to community identified needs and includes actionable strategies that can make a difference in the communities we're aiming to better support.

So in the beginning of next year, so end of this year we're going to consolidate this research and make the first, create the first draft draft of the action plan. And beginning of next year we'll have interagency consultation. We'll work with our, our state partners to provide input on the, on the action plan and refine that.

We will have more opportunity for public engagement. We're looking for publication in Q2 of next year and then in Q3. And ongoing will really be about how do we try to incorporate and infuse the these, this action plan into our decision making. And it's baked in from the beginning as opposed to an afterthought. Next slide please.

I have just two more slides here for us. So this one's kind of a meaty one, but it's a lot of work that we do and it's around overcoming one of the biggest constraints that we hear regularly about.

The need for accessible and reliable infrastructure to enable market expansion and, and the struggle with how long it takes to build in California. Overcoming these blocks and finding ways to streamline the permit process is another major area of our team's work. And frankly, all the agencies think about this too.

But fortunately we have some laws that help us do this. And you can see those there on the top. The first two are around streamlining EV charging stations. We also have one for streamlining hydrogen fueling stations as well. And some years ago Gobiz noticed really low compliance. Right.

So you look, you can see there, see the map in the corner. In 2019 those were the jurisdictions that were streamlined and so we stepped up to help the jurisdictions come into compliance. Now the map on the right there is today the EV chart. This is for EV chargers.

And we have more than 90% of the state streamlined or streamlining in process. And you'll see kind of in the center there where we have some yellow in the Central Valley and Fresno area.

For quite a long time that was in areas that were either rural or remote or didn't have as much or very smaller populations that didn't have a lot of activity going on in ZEV infrastructure development.

But now as we're moving more into the medium and heavy duty space and looking at how we really decarbonize trucking sector and decarbonize and electrify. I99 and I5, you know, this is coming up more often.

So our team is helping to go to these places that may need a little bit extra support and figure out how we can help them become more streamlined. We've also kicked off the hydrogen station streamlining effort.

So the map, though it's not on this slide here looks very much like the 2019 map from EV for the EV charging, but not for long. And then we additionally have several other resources that we provide on our website. We do. I'll drop down to the last bullet there directly.

Assistance for jurisdictions and for developers come with site specific challenges and we can help try to work through those together. And we've also kicked off a series of proactive outreach campaigns going to those places in the state where we know development is going to happen because state investment has been awarded there.

And working with the jurisdictions ahead of time to understand what are your concerns, what kinds of barriers you have, how can we help make this smoother when the permit does hit your counter? Last slide here. Next, please.

So at the end of the day, we really need to do everything we can, especially in today's landscape, to enable market expansion. And it's going to take all of us, it always did, but it's really going to take us all now. So just a few parting thoughts.

Supportive ZEV policies and incentives work, as evidenced by 29.1 new car sales in Q3, I hope. But I suspect that Q4 will not necessarily look that way. And so a big push ahead of the federal incentives ending. And despite challenges, our agencies and stakeholders remain committed. Right.

We hear this regularly from business coming in and saying, we want to move forward, we want to go. Let's think about how we can do this smarter. We had some within the interagency effort to develop recommendations under the ZEV eo. There were some legislative recommendations. Those really can help drive us forward.

So for your consideration, that is something that can help. We need to be thinking about more creative strategies and partnerships, and this is needed now more than ever, and how we can maybe do things a little bit differently because things are not the same as they were in the past.

And lastly, the system's thinking to really maximize our impact and ensure that the resources we have can go as far as they can is critical. So with that, I really thank you for inviting me to be here with you and thanks so much for your attention.

Thank you so much. And next we'll have Nancy Skinner, our Commissioner for the California Energy Commission. Oh, sorry, Michelle is next. Michelle, did you want to go ahead? I. Yes, that would be great. Can you hear me? Yes, wonderful.

Perfect. And thanks, Gia, for the framing. You helped get me in a place where I don't have to do some of my presentation. Hello and good afternoon. It's my pleasure to be here today on behalf of the California Air Resources Board. My name is Michelle Buffington and I am the chief over CARB's mobile source control division.

My team designs, develop and implements flight duty, medium duty, heavy duty and off road, vehicle and engine regulations, fleet rules, and a vast majority of our mobile source incentive programs. If it has wheels or tracks, some tracks, they're in this division. So if you can go to the next slide, please.

Today I'm going to start by reviewing where we are with CARBS regulatory programs. As you know, this year we've seen unprecedented attack by the Federal Government on CARBS programs, including many of the programs that were part of our recent State Implementation Plan submittals to the usepa.

As a reminder, the State Implementation Plan provide a roadmap for California to meet the Federal National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These standards are to protect public health and California transportation. Dollars from the federal Government depend on us meeting these standards.

In January, after the Biden Administration unfortunately failed to act on several of our regulatory programs and in response to statements by the incoming Administration opposing CARS programs, CARB withdrew waivers and authorization requests that were still awaiting action by the US EPA. This withdrawal included requests related to the advanced plane fleets and other regulations seen on this slide.

In June, the President signed three unconstitutional and illegal Congressional resolutions which California is challenging. These illegal resolutions purported to disapprove 3 actions by USEPA waiving federal preemption for CARB's advanced clean cars 2 heavy duty omnibus and Advanced Clean Truck Regulations, with additional regulations tied to the Advanced Clean Trucks Waiver.

California firmly disputes the legality of those actions and has filed suit to defend California's Clean Air Act Waiver Authority. More recently, In August, the US EPA issued a proposed partial disapproval for CARB's submission of our Heavy Duty Inspection and Maintenance Program, also known as Clean Truck Check.

Of course, the current federal administration's attacks on clean air and environmental progress are not limited to CARS programs. EPA is intent on weakening federal clean air standards as well. Next slide, please. There are real impacts from these hostile federal actions.

CARB estimates that NOx emissions from mobile sources will be about 40% higher in 2037 compared to where we would have been with all of the adopted CARB regulations in place. And direct PM2.5 emissions will be approximately 18% higher in 2037.

As a significant precursor, increases in NOx emissions will result in increases in ozone and secondary PM 2.5 levels across the state. Exposure to criteria pollutants directly harms human health.

All these increases will lead to more than 14,500 additional cardiopulmonary deaths, 5,000 additional ospitalizations for cardiovascular and respiratory illness, and 6,700 additional emergency room visits over the lifetime of the impacted regulations.

Additionally, these adverse actions will increase diesel particulate matter emissions, especially from heavy duty trucks, which will lead to increased cancer risk in communities near freeways and other places with heavy truck traffic. Next slide please. In response to these adverse actions, this past June, Governor Newsom signed Executive Order N2725, doubling down on California's commitments to ZEVs.

This new directive reinforces previous set targets and kicks off a bold new chapter in clean transportation.

This most Recent Executive order called on CARB, the California Energy Commission, the Governor's Office of Business and Executive Development, the California State Transportation Agency and the Department of Consumer affairs to deliver fresh recommendations that would accelerate sub adoption, expand infrastructure and strengthen consumer protections.

It also directs CARB to develop new regulations consistent with state and federal law that reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, criteria pollutants and toxics, which will serve as an additional measure to build on existing regulations or as an alternative measure for clean technology advancement. Next slide please.

In developing the recommendations to advance ZEV adoption, the agencies held a series of dialogue sessions branded ZEV Forward to gather public input. Feedback received primarily centered around three focus areas, affordability, infrastructure and the ZEV market itself.

And across the board there was consensus that California must keep backing those who are ready to invest in a cleaner future, even in uncertain times. Dialogue from these sessions directly shaped recommendations across six priority areas as seen on this slide. One recommendation was to continue driving private investment.

The state has seen success through programs like the Low Carbon Fuel Standard because of the lcfs.

A large portion of this ongoing private sector investment goes into supporting successful implementation of California's ZEV strategy by reducing the cost of electricity and hydrogen fueling, making it more financially viable to deploy and fuel ZEV technology, and expanding the availability of ZEV charging and fueling infrastructure.

Another priority was infrastructure, which I am I'm assuming Commissioner Skinner will touch on in just a few moments. I'll move on to with the Incentives with federal uncertainty clouding the road ahead, incentives are at the forefront of our state strategy to keep ZEVs and infrastructure affordable and accessible for all.

Multi year stability in the ZEV market will deliver real benefits in communities hit hardest by air pollution. Monetary and non monetary incentives are especially critical to an enabling early ZEV adoption, shaping public behavior and building lasting change.

Agencies also recommended development of new regulatory programs that address consumer protection and ensure that overburdened communities see the benefits of reduced emissions. The report additionally recommends leveraging the state's purchasing power as a market participant and fifth largest economy in the world to lead by example and support local governments.

ZEV fueling costs have a direct impact on the total cost of ownership between stabilization of these. The stabilization of these costs plays a significant role in reducing the overall gap between a ZEV and conventionally fueled vehicle. Next slide please.

I'll now switch gears and focus on the tools that CARB uses to reduce emissions from the combustion vehicles and to accelerate deployment of ZEV. The tools primarily fall into two categories. CARB's regulatory authority complemented by our incentive programs. CARB's regulatory program is the foundation for Long Term Sector wide Emission Reductions.

CARB uses regulations to ensure clean vehicles are available to purchase and that those vehicles are operating in California, guaranteeing that the air quality benefits of ZEVs are delivered to Californians. CARB has adopted several regulations that accomplish these goals, including but not limited to the Advanced Clean Trucks, the Advanced Clean Fleets and the Advanced Clean Cars 2 regulations.

As noted, all three of these regulations have been impacted by actions at the federal level, but CARB is not sitting back. Building off of the Executive Order, we're moving forward to develop new standards for light, medium and heavy duty vehicles as part of our Drive Forward Initiative that CARB launched in October.

These regulations will send an important signal to markets and investors that California is steadfast in its commitments to clean air and zero emission market stability and establish the necessary framework to ensure accountability and consistent progress on ZEV deployments. But regulations are only part of the story.

CARB's portfolio of incentive programs has played an integral role in the development and deployment of ZEVs to improve air quality and public health and reduce the negative impacts of climate change.

CARB has been implementing high profile ZEV Forward incentive programs for over a decade, including hvip, our Clean Truck and Bus Voucher Program, and programs under the Air Quality Improvement Program for Heavy Duty Vehicles and on the Light duty side, the Driving Clean Driving Clean Assistance Program, Regional Clean Cars for All Programs and the Late Clean Vehicle Rebate Project.

And I'll talk more about incentives on the next slide which we can move over to. This slide provides a quick overview of CARB's various incentive programs.

I won't go over each of these programs in detail, but would like to point out that the Low Carbon Transportation Program includes many of the programs I mentioned earlier, Hfip, Clean Cars for All, Drive Clean Assistance Program and Clean Mobility Options, among others.

Much of the funding for these programs has historically come from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which are revenues generated from the Cap and Invest program. These programs have been complemented by incentives generated by the Low Carbon Fuel Standard and the Utility Directed Clean Fuel Rewards Program. These incentive programs are proven success stories.

In February this year alone, more than 200 HVIP funded vehicles hit the road, making California the number one market in the US for zero emission trucks. For Light duty, the Clean Cars for All programs have resulted in 28,000 vehicles replaced, while the Driving Clean Assistance Program is currently processing over 24,000 applications.

Of these, over 900 applicants are currently receiving one on one financial counseling. Together, these programs mark another step in California's efforts to streamline programs and expand access to underserved communities. But dedicated and continuous funding for these programs remains a challenge, causing consumer confusion and frustration as well as breaking trust of the industry and community partners.

With the recent expiration of the federal tax credits, the CAR programs have become even more important for consumers and businesses in the state. And on my last slide, which we can move to now, I just like to end my testimony highlighting how crucial our Air District partners are in driving emissions and laying the groundwork for ZEV deployment.

In addition to being our partners when it comes to our incentive programs, the Air Districts are able to directly regulate local sources of air pollution and also have the opportunity to engage in cooperative agreements with emission sources within their region.

A great example of this is the landmark infrastructure agreement just approved by the South Coast Air Quality Management District two weeks ago with the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles.

The cooperative agreement prioritizes the development of zero emission infrastructure at the ports, the first critical step towards eliminating emissions from cargo handling equipment, harbor craft, trucks, trains and ocean going vessels and attaining clean air in the region. This is a replicable strategy that can be used to address large emission sources across the state.

We look forward to continue working collaboratively with you all, our local partners, our sister state agencies and stakeholders, and continuing to drive forward public health and transportation dollars demand our success. And with that, I will turn it over to Commissioner Skinner. Thank you.

Thank you so much. And Commissioner Skinner, if you're on.

Right. Oh, yes. I had to unmute. Okay.

Yay. I've been trying to get to you.

Great.

I know. And I, I was just saying, Assembly Member Chavo, would you like me to start? And of course, you couldn't hear me because I was muted.

Oh, no.

Thank you so much for this invitation.

And I am a relatively recent appointee by Governor Newsom to the California Energy Commission and the division that—one of the divisions that I oversee, the primary one, is our Fuels and Transportation Division, which is responsible for the overseeing all of the funding that the Energy Commission provides to support zero emission fueling and charging infrastructure.

That's for both hydrogen and EVs and also various regulations on EV charging, which I will go into in a minute. And the Legislature has been very generous to us over the years in terms of providing funding to support EV infrastructure. So, I will now go to my next slide or the slide that says "CEC supports states infrastructure."

We—this lays out some of the things that the Commission does. As I mentioned, we provide grants for installation of EV chargers. For light duty and medium and heavy-duty vehicles, we have many different funding solicitations, which may be familiar to some of you. Communities in charge for example, is one. Reach is another. Energize is another.

Energize primarily funds medium and heavy-duty infrastructure. And then there's a program called Cal EVIP. So, we have a variety of them.

And our—what our goal is, is to have a really robust statewide public network of charging that people like Assemblymember Schiavo can use and does not leave her either waiting or having to extend her trip much longer because she cannot find charging.

And I will say that we're in much better shape and we'll get to that in a minute. But also, one of the key issues that we've identified, many studies have identified this, one of the key issues for a hindrance to a person becoming an EV owner is whether they can charge at home at their residence, and if not directly at the residence, then very close by.

And when I say very close by, I'm not talking about half a mile or such. I'm talking about literally in the same neighborhood.

So, we are—we have been—funding installations of charging at multifamily residences and we intend to make that one of our key targets in this upcoming year for our solicitations because the more charging that we can get into multifamily residences, the more people Californians will feel comfortable in acquiring an EV.

So, that's one of our emphasis and part of that is there are overall focus on delivering and supporting equitable access to electric vehicles and electric charging for all EV charging rather for all Californians.

So, some of the other things I mentioned, we have the regulatory responsibility for EV charger reliability for plug and charge, also known as roaming requirements, and that's what all of us would like to get to at some point with EV charging. Plug and charge is absolutely the easiest.

Assemblymember Schiavo mentioned about how great it is that more vehicles are moving to the NACC standard. The NACC standard is of course the type of connector which—then the type of cord that you use.

But ultimately, we would like for all vehicles and all chargers to be what they call plug and charge, where the vehicle itself communicates to the charger and the, the payment mechanism, everything, is basically between the vehicle and the charger without a lot of interventions by the user, for example, having to use an app or a credit card or various other things.

And so, one of the things that we're trying to do is help move the industry in that direction.

The other areas that we have regulatory responsibility for are payment methods. And within our EV charger reliability regulation, we're also creating the condition to allow us, the CEC, to have the most accurate statewide inventory of EV chargers in the state. The other thing we do is conduct planning and analysis for the EV charging needs.

Where there are EV charging deserts, how many EV chargers we project that we will need? Those kinds of things and much of that has been statutorily directed to us by the Legislature.

We also will, especially through our reliability regs, track and report the reliability of the chargers, like what percent of our chargers have met uptime and are operating and various things like that. So, let's go to the next slide.

So, here are some of our successes and I know my good colleagues, both Gia at GoBiz and Michelle at CARB, who are very strong partners—the CEC works very closely with both GoBiz and CARB, so there may be a little bit of duplication, but not much in terms of what we were presenting.

But to date, nearly 2.5 million light duty EVs have been sold in California, so they're on our roads now. And more than 5,800 medium and heavy duty EVs are on California roads. And even with the federal assault, we are seeing an uptick in in heavy duty vehicles and trucks and such.

And we are doing our best to support them with really good charging infrastructure because they need much more high-powered charging, as you can imagine. We now have, statewide, more than 201,000 public and shared—and I'll mention, I'll explain what shared is in a minute—EV chargers, which are at workplaces, retail sites, park and ride lots, gas stations, hotels, various other public facilities, libraries, community centers.

And when we say shared EV chargers, we're talking about chargers like at workplaces and at different facilities where perhaps it's not full public access, but there's—it is for the use of a large number of people who utilize that facility. So, let's say, for example, in a workplace. There are now over 800,000 EV chargers installed at California residences.

So, those could be single family homes, duplexes, other multifamily locations. The majority, though, are at single family homes. And now, we have adopted the EV charger regulations, which will—are directed solely towards the publicly funded EV chargers. They require a certain amount of uptap, they require a certain level of uptime, and I'll describe that a little more.

But the other thing about those regulations is it requires all installed chargers, even ones that we haven't funded, to provide us data about the charger, the location, the, you know, what the type, the amount of power, so that we can have a real statewide inventory of public charging installations, which does not exist right now.

So, let's go to the next slide. Okay, sorry for my delay. So, here are some of the directives that the Legislature has given to us. There were two bills that gave us the responsibility to do the charge of reliability and inventory regulations and report on the status of that reliability and those bills are listed there.

And we have now adopted those regulations and we've begun reporting on the status of reliability, though we will be in much better shape to do that reporting once the regs are fully in effect.

We've been given or extended the regulatory authority for charger payment methods for roaming, which is also the movement towards plug and charge, and bidirectional charging. We also have the responsibility to estimate the EV charging network needed to meet state goals to ensure equitable access. And those were two different bills, an AB and an SB.

And we have been given, through budgetary actions and the Clean Transportation Program, a good amount of funding to provide, as I mentioned, grants and support for not only EV charging installations, but also hydrogen fueling installations. Let's go to the next slide. I've already mentioned something about these reliability and reporting regs.

This slide pretty much gives a little bit more detail. They do, due to the legislation, they don't impact every charger that's publicly installed, only those that had some support from ratepayer funds or, say, an air district funds or the CEC state funds, that kind of thing.

So, they have to have a public funding source in order to be followed under the regs. So, there are private sector entities that have been installing chargers and are increasing to install chargers, which we're very happy about, that don't necessarily. If their, say, charger station was completely private sector funded, it does not fall under the regs.

And there was always a debate in the Legislature about whether these regulations should fall over everyone. And I'm sure, Assemblymember Schiavo, you could probably give some background on that.

But I think the decision was made, and now I'm somewhat interpreting, but to make sure that it is on those that are publicly funded because at least if any level of government is providing the private sector the funds to do this type of charging when we obviously expect and require reliability.

Now, on the private sector, we would hope that those private sector entities, and there's many now, whether it's Tesla or the new consortium, Iona or Rivian, or GM is even setting up some stations, Electrify, Electrify America, EV Go, others, that they have their own business interest in making sure that their chargers are reliable.

Because if their chargers are not, then customers will not go. And if they've not been receiving, say, governmental support, then they're obviously operating completely on their own investment and maintaining based on the revenue they're generating, so, they have a very strong private or personal interest to make sure that those charges are reliable.

Let's go to the next slide. Now this gives you a little picture of the, the way that the charging network has grown, and I hope Assemblymember Schiavo and other folks who are part of this hearing, who have an EV, I hope you've experienced this growth because there—it really has been quite significant over the last couple of years.

You see those two big jumps and one of the things I mentioned that we have been, we are going to be, and we have been focusing on, installations at multifamily units.

The other thing that we are focusing on is supporting installation of what we call the gas station model, which is DC Fast charging installations. And the reason is because those need low dwell time.

So, in other words, if you're on the road and you're trying to get somewhere quickly and you need a charge, the DC Fast are the kind that can give you a charge in 15 minutes, you know, half hour max, compared to what we call the level 2 chargers where your vehicle might need to sit there for a couple hours, four hours longer in order to really get an adequate charge.

And those type of Level 2 are optimal for, say, example, workplaces or for campus school sites, say where a vehicle is going to be left for a long period of time, whereas the DC Fast are the type that, you know, we need all through the state, which, again, we sort of refer to as the gas station model.

And interestingly, I didn't mention this, but those 201,000 public and shared EV chargers, that's the number of ports, that is more than the number of gas nozzles which are currently installed in California. So, we have more charging ports that are public or privately shared than gas nozzles. Let's go to the next slide. So, obstacles to EV acceleration.

My good partners have already mentioned some of them.

We've seen a real assault by the White House on clean transportation with the reversal on the incentives for zero emission vehicle purchase, the complete reversal on the funding for charging networks, the federal programs like NEVI, reversal on the funding for to support EV manufacturing and battery manufacturing, and a variety of other tax credits.

Some of them have not fully expired and there's been some exceptions made and clearly, there are a great deal of court cases. California has joined with a number of other states in suing the Federal Government on many of these reversals, and I'm happy to say that we have been successful in winning a number of those court cases.

And I'll describe some of that funding and what we've been able to achieve so far in getting it out the door, even with the federal trying to take it away.

However, the, the incentives or the tax credits to you or I to purchase an EV, those did expire and we did see—they expired September 30th—and we did see a large jump in EV purchases in this last quarter.

So, 29.1% of all new cars bought in that third quarter of this fiscal year—or not fiscal year, sorry, of this calendar year—ending September 30th, 2025, showed a big jump in 29.1% of new vehicles as EVs.

Some of the other obstacles are, I think Gia mentioned and Go Biz is tracking, that even with the good legislation to get localities to streamline the permitting of EV charging installations, there's a number of local governments that dragged their feet and it would appear some of them don't—it's like they don't know how to apply the legislation correctly.

Some of them are—just have not at all and others have added new rules that perhaps the legislation was, you know, not as clear about.

So, we're finding—as I mentioned, there's now, and it's wonderful, there's some great private sector new initiatives that are really dedicated to helping expand California's statewide network of EV charging installations.

And as we know, both with what the feds are doing and just the California budget, you know, even if it were still, you know, in, in a situation with a surplus, we can't possibly—we, the state—can't possibly fund all the installation of chargers that are needed. Right?

We need to rely on the private sector and we need them to be our partners. And one things that they get frustrated about is delays when they've made an investment and they're trying to get a charger opened.

I think that what in my experience now, as many people know, when I was in the Legislature, I did a lot of housing legislation and we found similar types of delays in our trying to build housing units where developers wouldn't be able to get permits.

And then of course, once they built the building, sometimes the utility wouldn't energize these units. They would be ready to be occupied and they wouldn't be—they wouldn't turn the lights on. We've got that problem with some of our utilities and a number of our EV charging installations. We also have some testing and verification delays.

All of those hinder the private sector investment. So, the better we can do in trying to remove as many obstacles as possible, the easier we're going to make it for those private sector entities that are willing to make these investments to still be willing and able to do business in California and to expand this type of business.

While the CEC does not have that specific responsibility for tracking, say the permitting process delays Go Biz does, we, because we fund many, many entities—we fund businesses, we fund nonprofit groups, we fund local governments, we fund all kinds of entities to install chargers—and we hear back from them all the time about these problems.

So, we track them and we're very on top of them, and we work very closely with Go Biz to try to address them. But all of them, as I mentioned, can slow EV momentum and negatively impact the market and, of course, impact consumer confidence. So, let's go to the next slide.

This is the situation where some of that funding that I mentioned, the White House had reversed, and, of course, California joined, in particular, the NEVI Program. The NEVI Program was—the purpose of it was to support a national network of fast chargers, DC Fast chargers, that would connect key transportation corridors. So, California joined with 15 other states.

We sued. The courts restored the NEVI funds after that lawsuit. And we are still—it's like anything, even though the court ruled the office that administers the funds to us is, you know, it's trying to change rules and giving us a little headache.

But we're trying to move as quickly as possible to—the way the NEVI funding worked is there was, it was formulaic, so California got a specified amount and they—while the court has said we can access that entire amount, that particular federal highway office has not quite allowed us to yet.

So, as you can see, we've got in our hot hands the 67 million but 306 million is still pending. We're staying optimistic that the court ruling will get the federal office that we're working with to free up those funds, but we're staying on it and we're, of course, in close communication with the AG's Office.

There are two other programs that the White House reversed, the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Program and something called EVCRAA, the Electric Vehicle Charger Reliability and Accessibility. It's a long title, don't worry about it.

But anyway, and those are still, there's still a discussion amongst not only internally to California, but with other states as to whether we're going to do a challenge to those. And let's go to the next slide. So, here's some of our work plan for this upcoming year.

As I mentioned, a targeting support for a focus on multifamily charging installations with a continued focus on low income and disadvantaged communities. The other thing we want to do is more specifically identify EV charging deserts and optimal public access locations.

We want locations that the public can feel comfortable using and are accessible so that when people are—again, you're trying to get somewhere and you need to go to charge, you've got somewhere you can go and confidently charge your vehicle.

We're also working on, as both of my sister agencies have mentioned, minimizing the barriers to EV charging deployment.

And we will be in this year working on and proffering the regulations on charger payment methods and roaming or the availability—accelerating the availability of plug and charge. And then, next. So, my last slide, I just want to make a couple of other key comments.

I really wanted to thank Michelle and ARB for laying out so clearly the tangible public health consequences of our continued reliance on non-zero emission transportation. In other words, we often reference California's goals to move to clean energy and zero emission transportation as climate strategies, which they are, clearly, and that's a long-term goal.

But the immediate need, which is also addressed immediately in real time, is cutting the tailpipe emissions that literally lead to deaths of Californians every year. That lead to the smog, that are hurting all of our health and that, while our climate goals are essential, they're longer term for us to see the consequences.

We can see the consequences immediately in the affected communities if we can move over to zero emission transportation. And I wanted to really state that because I think we find a lot of times some attitudes that, well, you know, EVs are only for a certain category of people, or what have you.

And really, we have an overall public good goal, an overall public health goal to accelerate our transition to zero emission vehicles. It's going to benefit all Californians.

So, I just wanted to thank CARB for so squarely laying that out and again, thank my partners, Gia at Go Biz, and all the other staff at Go Biz for the work that we're doing to, to identify and remove those obstacles and to CARB always for the different ways that we partner and I'll stop. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Incredibly helpful to hear all of the updates and the progress that's being made despite some real serious challenges that we have as well. And I look forward to some of the reports coming out and being shared with us in the Legislature and new policies.

I just, I don't, unfortunately, I don't think we have time for questions because we want to make sure we get all of these other panels in too that are larger than this one. But I do want to just make a plug.

I know, Go Biz, you were talking about the equity plan, and I didn't see and incorporated in that planning process any inclusion or conversations with the Legislature.

And so, I hope that that will happen and that there will be conversations with the Legislature around that because I know myself and my colleagues certainly have lots of questions, concerns, and ideas and I just want to also make a plug.

Commissioner Skinner and to everyone really who's in the space of identifying where there are charging deserts like you were talking about, where there are real needs and obviously, equity. I was talking with my colleague, Assemblymember Elhawary, who was hoping to be here today but unable to be, and she was taught—she has an EV as well.

And she was talking about in south LA there are no chargers. She has a really difficult time finding charging there. And I would echo that in the San Fernando Valley, there is very, very little charging in the San Fernando Valley.

And, and I think that, you know, there's a lot, a lot of progress that we can make, and I mean there's a lot of people that live there, representing that area myself. So, really grateful to all three of you for being here today. Thank you so much. Thank you for your work. Thank you for the input.

And we look forward to continuing to work together to move the ball forward here in California and make sure we can continue to lead. So, thank you.

Thanks for including us. Thank you.

So, next, we'll bring up our second panel on passenger vehicles and light duty sector. And I'll just, as a reminder, please keep to your eight minutes or less so we can have some of discussion. That would be wonderful.

And so, as people are getting settled, I think we had Laura Renger first, up first, from Cal ETC and...

It's okay. Got a seating order and everything. And then after Laura, we'll have Mike Murphy and then Minh Lee, Emil Abdul Shahid and Daniel Barad. Is how we doing? Good. Okay, Wonderful. Please, Laura, if you're ready.

Okay. Thank you so much. My name is Laura Ranger and I am the Executive Director of the California Electric Transportation Coalition or CalETC. First, I just want to thank you, Chair Schiavo and Members of the Select Committee and staff for hosting this really important hearing here in Los Angeles. CalETC.

Is a nonprofit organization that supports and advocates for for the transition to a zero emission transportation future. Our board of directors includes representatives from Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Pacific Gas and Electric, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, San Diego Gas and Electric, Southern California Hedison, Southern California Public Power Authority and the Northern California Power Agency.

In addition to electric utilities, our membership also includes major automakers, manufacturers of zero emission trucks and buses, electric vehicle charging providers and other industry leaders supporting transportation electrification. We strongly support California's efforts to fight climate change and air pollution through electrification of all forms of transportation.

Now more than ever, strong state leadership is needed to fill the vacuum left by federal policies. An important tool that California still has in its toolbox and that was touched on earlier today is is incentive funding. Today I'd like to talk about two critical sources of incentive funding.

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund or GGRF and the Low Carbon Fuel Standard or lcfs. California has made significant investments through the GGRF through successful programs such as CARB's Hybrid and Zero Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project or HVIP Air District and statewide Clean Cars for All programs and the CEC's Clean Transportation Program.

The CARB programs that I just discussed were included in Michelle's slide on the LCT bucket. And the CEC Clean Transportation Program is of course what Commissioner Skinner. It's still hard to say. Commissioner. Still want to say Senator. So sorry. Excuse me there.

Commissioner Skinner discussed at the CEC, California's commitment to funding ZEV incentive programs with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund has created over 200,000 clean transportation jobs. It has attracted over 60 ZEV and ZEV related firms to invest in based operations in California.

It has put over 2.2 million passenger ZEVs and over 27,0 emission medium and heavy duty trucks on our roads which is the largest ZEV fleet in the nation. And it has attracted nearly $12 billion in announced EV investments. Our programs funded by GGRF have helped reduce transportation related GHG emissions by roughly 12% since 2017.

And going forward, we believe that the most impactful action that the Legislature can take is to establish a continuous GGRF appropriation for these critical clean transportation programs. As discussed in the first panel, sometimes the demand for funding exceeds the supply, leading programs such as HVIP to go through a START stop which creates market uncertainty.

Providing California ZEV incentive programs with durable long term funding will ensure that consumers and industry have confidence that the state is not just committed to meeting its ZEV goals, but also has actionable funding plans to achieve them. Now is the time to demonstrate California's leadership with durable funding that will enable us to achieve these goals for completeness.

I also want to mention another critical source of incentive funding, the low carbon fuel standard. Earlier this year, the Assembly Select Committee on the Transportation Costs and Impact of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard took a deep dive look at the LCFS and we're very grateful for their work because that Select Committee did such a thorough job.

I won't go into the LCF today, but it is important to remember that on a per ton basis of emissions reduced, it is one of California's most cost effective carbon reduction programs. Before I conclude, I'd like to share a few additional recommendations regarding adoption in multifamily housing and managed charging.

Installing charging in multifamily housing poses a number of barriers and including cost, electrical capacity constraints and vandalism. Existing state efforts to incentivize significant amounts of EV charging and multifamily housing have had limited success because the solutions that are being deployed are expensive.

The property owners are unwilling to lose parking spaces mostly due to restrictions for shared parking in addition to DC fast charging and level 2 charging. CalETC also recommends that the state support deploying scale scalable level one charging in assigned parking spaces at multi family housing.

Level one charging is a promising, highly scalable and cost effective way to provide charging for those in multi family housing. It's good for the grid. It costs a lot lower than level 2 and meets the needs for most people more than 9 out of 10 drivers.

Local programs, including Peninsula Clean Energy's program have recently broken records with the amount of Level 1 chargers installed in multifamily housing, with one project installing about 150 chargers, one for each parking space. Lastly, I'd like to urge the state to prioritize managed charging in EV programs.

Transportation electrification coupled with managed charging leads to lower costs for all electric utility customers, even those that don't own an evidence. This is because electric vehicles can be charged off peak when there is excess grid capacity and this leads to more efficient utilization of the grid.

Additionally, managed charging programs can defer service transformer upgrades, enabling higher utilization on existing assets, enabling EV load to materially depress our rates in the future. Electric vehicles may also be more frequently used to power homes, buildings, or even provide power back to the grid during peak demand periods or when grid power is not available.

Recognizing the adoption of electric vehicle leads to greater grid affordability and reliability. The state should prioritize programs that incentivize the adoption of electric vehicles on managed charging programs.

Managed charging programs can consist of demand flexibility programs, time of use rates, distribution system overload avoidance, and grid upgrade deferral vehicle to building and or vehicle to grid capabilities thank you for the opportunity to present today and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much. We'll hold questions till the end, but Mr. Murphy, if you wanted to go next, sure.

Button here we have to electrify the microphone. I'd like to thank the Chair for her leadership in this area and for inviting us to the hearing today. The bad news is I have a PowerPoint. The good news is I'm going for the bonus points. At 7 and a half minutes we'll see if I can do it.

I started the American EV Jobs alliance and our companion organization, evsforallamerica.org because as a longtime Republican political consultant and son of Detroit, I was troubled by the senseless partisan division over EVs. So we went out and did a whole bunch of campaign style polling.

We have a very practical, useful solution attitude and we have been educating a lot of the OEMs on how to better communicate. They fund us along with rideshare and just some cranks who love EVs. So I want to talk about pinch points if we can go, oh I've got my own controller, see if I can work it.

Pinch points we can solve at the state level because the Feds are checked out to the next presidential race. And there are two things that bubble to the top for us based on our polling, including a new poll of just apartment and condo residents in California.

One is level two charging and multi family, which I know you're hearing a lot about. It's important, in fact, it's a huge opportunity. And second is a conquest credit of $3,500 for new and used EVs at the state level. Now the key to that is a word you haven't heard a lot that comes from the auto industry.

Conquest credit. That's when we only give credit to new EV drivers, to converts much more affordable. You get out of the billions Problem into the hundreds of millions problem. But it is a way to put every dollar of incentive on a convert.

And we care about that because over 80% of people who buy or lease an EV still stick with EVs. So let's get into a few details here on the tax credit. I kind of gave you the highlights.

Our belief from the research is seller lease of newer used EV in California Conquest only for people leaving ICE for EV based on their registration status of their current vehicle, much, much cheaper and the $3,500 number. Anybody in the car business will tell you the cars are sold on payment, not on price.

More than half, almost 70% of new vehicles are leased and it allows the salesman to close the deal for 100 bucks off the monthly lease payment, which is a very powerful selling tool. And again those lease cars are good because almost 85% of them are leased at 36 months or less.

So they go down to the used market and get resold. So in 40 months you can create 280% likely to stick used EV drivers. Now the other thing, and this is always a little more delicate topic, EV sales is about volume. The income limit gets in the way of volume.

It's not that wealthier people need money to buy an ev. They need the sales psychology of thinking they got something to feel better about the anxiety they have about charging. And it's an important part of the sales equation. Go to the next slide here. Multifamily, our obsession. And I've got a few amazing stuff statistics here.

The wait a minute forward. So to cut to the chase, if California's huge multi family population we're charging at a rate slightly less than single family homeowners do because we adjust down a little bit for income. It would be the fifth largest state in America in EV sales. New and used it is a huge universe.

We have more than 7.5 million people in California live in multifamily units of 10 or more dwellings. So we polled them, we wanted to know, well, would you be interested first of all, do you have access to charging? And we did both condos and apartments. Apartments are about 90% of the population. Condos are 10.

But combined as you can see, 76 to 80% believe they don't have access. Some say there's some in their building. Never enough. We asked people, well if you had it, would you be more likely to acquire an EV?

And as you can see on the right, we have income levels, newer used car buyers, all the kind of breakouts. It's a significant number. Some do in the 70s. So there's a huge pent up market there. We estimate it could be 75 to 80,000 new and used EV sales per year.

Well, which again is more than all but four states in America right now. It is a massive unlocked constituency where there's complete appetite. Now we ask people about headwinds. What's your number one hesitation? You apartment dwellers or condo dwellers. And we have this data nationally for everybody. And it mirrors, it's even worse here.

It's overnight EV charging that homeowners put in their garages. Very hard to do in condos or apartments. That number nationally is 75% among all car commerce people. And I worry about charging. So it is the key to the lock for rapid EV sales market increasing in markets like California.

One sub point that people often forget in this debate. 80% of EVs are sold in just 15 states. We know from our data. We ask people, do you have friends or relatives who own an EV or don't you? If they say yes, I don't care if they're MAGA Republican or Bernie Revolutionary or anything in between.

They will say on every question we ask about EVs not for people like me doesn't work liberal plot. Whatever we ask them to agree or disagree with, if they have friends or relatives with an EV, they don't friends or relatives, they rate EVs 15 to 20 points higher.

So states with more EV density have that word of mouth and it becomes a compounding loop. So that's where a lot of the action is. And of course California leads that. If we were a country we'd be the 10th biggest EV market in the world. So there's an opportunity to compound.

And there are taxpayers in these multifamily buildings. We ask them spending a few $1000 to permanently install EV charging unit in apartment condos. One of those cost effective things government could do. And as you can see you get to a 70% agreement there because it's tangible to them.

Rideshare drivers are another group that would have a meaningful several $1004 to 600 a month increase in income if they were charging overnight. And more than half are in apartment buildings rather than waiting in line at fast charging stations. I am a big fan of fast charging.

I have driven a non Tesla no supercharger access EV from LA to Boston six times to kind of experiment with the market. And then I got to yell at Volkswagen engineers for an hour which was fun, you know, the therapy Assembly person. But the highway thing is working pretty well now. The problem is the multiplexes.

My office on Robertson Boulevard is across from an EV Go station where the weeds on the brand new equipment that has never been commissioned became higher. It looked like the walking dead Nancy Skinner, to her great credit intervened. And now it looks like that thing will be finally, after two and a half years, commissioned on in January.

But it's so hard here to do it. The cost advantage. And we'll get into this quickly with kind of as I wrap up with the new model, we've hired Atlas Policy. We're doing a best practices study. We're going to get back in December and share with anybody interested, including the CEC where we've been involved in all this.

If the state will pay the install the conduit and the box and the rate payer, which is a much better payback, will only contribute part. They can't electrify the whole building. It'll kill the utilities on cost. But if they do the distribution side of it only, there's significant new power revenue.

Now that box has to load balance because during the day if you have a 40 unit building and 12 people are trying to charge, which is a very extreme example, almost never does everybody try to plug in, you've got to balance the machines down because you want to avoid adding new service if you can.

So the key in all this is the landlords. There is no money to be made in putting charging in your building. And most of these buildings are run for cash flow. They're families who've had them a long time don't want to have the tax cost of selling.

So our model is the landlord collects the surcharge, 25 to 45 bucks a month. By the way, in our polling, 75% of apartment and condo owners said yes, I would pay up to 50amonth if I had a space with a charger in it and I would pay the power. So tenant pays power. No big markup.

You got to kind of pay at the residential rate because you want to beat the fast chargers. Small markup for maintenance. The landlord collects the 25 to 50 bucks a month for putting up with all this. And the state has to be the hamburger helper because the utility payback's not good enough.

States got to put the box there in the conduit with good IBEW labor. And they've been contributing to our study on how to do this. Well, finally I'll wrap up with I think the one disagreement we might have. There's a lot of talk about level one.

There is a case for it, particularly at airports the problem is the market has spoken on this and 80% of EV drivers in single family homes, which is almost all of them because we failed at multifamily, they choose to charge level two, even if they have to spend $1,000 to get it, to not be trapped in level one.

It is true that level one will charge you overnight at 4 miles of range per hour. Ish enough to kind of eat your broccoli and know you only need 30 miles. Everything we've done, we briefed auto CEOs all over the world. The number one research finding is people have a fear about range in charging.

And even though they don't need 300 miles, they want to know they can get it overnight. Otherwise, you're in the business of telling the customer they're wrong and that never works. So thank you for your time. Hopefully I hit seven and a half minutes and we look forward to working with the Committee.

We're being generous today, so we'll say yes.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Very interesting. Especially interesting to hear that polling, Mr. Lee.

Okay.

Well, it's going to be very hard to follow Mike here, but I'm glad he brought up the energy in the room. Good morning, Chair Schiavo and Commissioner Skinner, as well as other distinguished Members and guests here today. My name is Minh Lee. I'm here today to discuss Los Angeles County's leadership in the zero emission transition.

A transition that is critical to meeting California's ambitious climate goals and positioning us as a global model for sustainable mobility. As we prepare.

As we prepare to support the state and the City of Los Angeles in hosting the World Cup and Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, our clean transportation efforts demonstrate a tangible commitment to a greener, more resilient future. The County of Los Angeles is committed to achieving a fossil free, fuel free future by 2045.

Not just for our operations, but for our entire region. As laid out in the county sustainability Plan, this transition is being operationalized through rigorous planning and aggressive infrastructure buildout that serves as a scalable model for the rest of the state. Our foundational success lies in the development of our charging infrastructure.

The county, through our Clean Transportation Energy Program, operates one of the largest municipal electric vehicle networks in the nation. As of this month, we have deployed 1,814 and growing every week chargers across 130 active county sites serving our fleet, our employees and visiting Members of the public. This extensive network is not static.

We have a strong pipeline of nearly 800 additional charging ports currently in development, focusing on both Level 2 and DC fast charging capabilities. The this rapid end to end deployment demonstrates the county's ability to turn planning into palpable results, supporting grid reliability and maximizing charger uptime through advanced adaptive load management systems.

Our investment strategy is not solely about volume. It is fundamentally centered on equity. We intentionally prioritize development to benefit our most vulnerable communities. And it is simply not just about building charging stations. We also work directly with these communities to educate and learn about their clean transportation needs.

We do this with NGO partners with deep connections and roots in these communities that has resulted in grants that help us deploy not just EV charging stations, but also electric bikes and EV shuttle buses.

And just recently this month my Department hosted Charge Up Carmelitos and an event to celebrate the installation of an additional 20 new EV charging stations at the Carmelitos public housing community in Long Beach that serves over 700 families, expanding clean mobility access for residents.

We currently have over 65 charging stations at various county public housing sites and by next year we'll have over 100. I believe that will be the largest EV infrastructure network in the entire nation at public housing sites.

We also are working to deploy over 100 charging stations at multifamily communities through our SoCal event access program which is, you know, play on words with equity and ev. Furthermore, we are actively developing a ZEV workforce in partnership with organizations like LACI here as well as Charger help through the CEC ideal pilots.

We trained 207 individuals developing a regional clean mobility workforce pipeline and modular EVSE curriculum in partnership with local community colleges. This ensures that the jobs created by this transition benefit the residents who need it the most. We are working to lead by example with our municipal fleet.

The recently completed ZEV Mobility Plan serves as our critical roadmap to transition to counties for fleet into zero emissions.

This plan spans across 35 different departments and recommends over 6,300 ZEV replacements, 2,300 of which are MDH, medium and heavy duty vehicles across all vehicle classes, and recommends the installation of 3,700 new chargers across 450 sites to support our future fleet needs. And I know the slides don't really align with what I'm saying, but that's okay.

This is a list of all the the agencies that we partner with in order to do, you know, deploy this plan. This aggressive plan is designed to ensure full compliance with CARB's advanced clean fleets rule while aligning with LA County's broader goal of 100% clean fleet by 2045.

Crucially, we see strong internal adoption that goes beyond the fleet itself an estimated 17% of county employees who drive to work and at our regulated work sites are already driving electric vehicles. This level of employee adoption, coupled with 31 departments actively participating in leveraging ZEV infrastructure for their operations, demonstrates an integrated shift in our culture and mobility.

Now, just as a calibration, about 8% of light duty vehicles in LA County are electric and so our county employees are actually adopting at roughly twice the rate that you see otherwise. And partly that's because we have infrastructure at work.

This is anchored in our ecosystem approach to transportation electrification, which ensures intelligent interconnection and communication between our vehicles, the charging infrastructure, the electric grid and county buildings. Our integrated approach to fleet replacement and infrastructure planning mitigates future operational risk and reduces overall long term costs. If we can turn off the slides, that would be great.

In closing, Los Angeles County has the plans, the expertise and the demonstrable capability, with nearly 2,000 charging stations operational by the end of this year to achieve a fossil fuel free future.

Our path forward is clear and includes immediate action such as launching the ZEV Fleet Leadership Engagement Initiative to educate and empower our fleet managers with the tools, resources and support necessary to transition seamlessly and ensure compliance with the ACF rule.

This commitment is strengthened by our strategy to leverage innovative public private partnerships across the region, which allows us to share costs, drive the most effective, efficient solutions, and accelerate deployment for both vehicles and infrastructure. However, sustained state funding is critical to our shared success, particularly as government entities face hard compliance deadlines under ACF rules.

We respectfully asked the Assembly to consider action in three key areas sustain funding in these areas, in particular around the HVIP and a set aside for local governments within HVIP to help us meet the ACF rules would be highly effective. We also encourage agency coordination and bringing local governments to the table.

I think GIA mentioned that there are 15 state agencies working in some way on the ZEV transition. That's a lot of agencies, right? So let's coordinate and let's bring local governments to the table because we're the boots on the ground and we see firsthand the challenges in executing these ambitious goals and finally streamlining grid and permitting processes.

We know that there are certainly regulations and laws that have been passed to help this, but the reality on the ground is perhaps regulations may not be the way to go, but let's encourage local governments, utilities to actually achieve the ideal of those laws, those regulations, as opposed to just hard regulations.

So your partnership in these areas will empower us to replicate this equitable and effective model across the state and showcase California's climate leadership on a world stage. And I'm really excited here to announce the newest Member of my team, Alicia Gilday. She just recently came, she joined the county just a few weeks ago.

She recently came at the federal level where she was a senior Director for Transportation at the White House and also had leadership roles at the U.S. Department of Energy, where I also used to work a long time ago.

And so, you know, we have that federal perspective, national scale and relationships that can really help the county as well as the state meet our ZEV goals. Thank you.

Thank you so much and welcome. So Next we have Mr. Abdul Shahid. Thank you for being here, from LADWP.

Thank you. So my role at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is I'm the Director of Power, New Business and Electrification. And so we have a very critical role, consider ourselves a critical path to electrification because we help bring power and interconnect these services to the grid, which is a fairly important and somewhat complicated effort.

But through the collaboration with the state and the support of various programs, we've been able to achieve a very significant milestone where we're getting very close to our target, our end of the year target of 45,000 charges in the City of Los Angeles. And this is not done alone.

This is done in collaboration with, with Cal etc, in collaboration with the state, in collaboration with the EV charging developers. And we're going to be very close to hitting that goal if not surpassing it. So we're very much looking forward to counting the number of charges we have by the end of the year.

Another big milestone that we hit also as a result of the support that we've gotten from the state and from industry is supporting the adoption of registered electric vehicles in the City of Los Angeles. So as you can see here, as of June 2025, we had 230,057 charges in the, in the city registered in the city.

As of September 30th, that number surpassed our goal of 250,000 registered electric vehicles. So we're only counting above that now. So that's a big win for us.

It shows us that the incentives and everything that we've been doing so far is working and the adoption is occurring, you know, so this, this has a significant impact across the utility industry. We talk a lot about equity and we feel like one of the biggest pieces of bringing equity across the board is by keeping rates affordable.

And as you can see here, we do a lot of different things at the utility, whether we this fuel that we need to purchase for our generating stations, our renewable portfolio standards, building out transmission systems, maintaining them, making sure our system is reliable and resilient. All that, all that has a upward pressure on rates.

But as you can see here, bringing integrating electric vehicles into our service territory is one of the key things that brings a downward pressure on rates. And as we continue to to increase our renewable portfolio, we definitely need to continue to increase our electric vehicle portfolio.

So we continue that downward pressure on rates and see rates go down even faster or at an increased rate. So I just had a few slides that I wanted to share. Ultimately, the, the message that I think we want to send is the utility plays an important role.

I think a big hindrance to a lot of electric vehicle developers is the utility infrastructure that's required in order to bring their projects to fruition and get them energized.

And I think several members here at the table also agrees with that perspective that utility infrastructure is critical and will continue to be an important factor to getting everybody electrified. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much. And last but not least, Daniel Barad with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thank you, Daniel.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and Franklin. Thank you so much for having me here today. Daniel Barad, on behalf of Union of Concerned Scientists. Union of Concerned Scientists uses independent science to solve the world's most pressing issues.

So, today, I want to talk about three of our recent analyses and the solutions that they offer California in the Legislature. A recent report, "Cleaner Cars, Cleaner Airs," showed that pre-2004 vehicles make up fewer than 20% of the cars on the road, but they're responsible for almost 80% of the smog forming NOX emissions.

These cars are also disproportionately located in low-income communities. And so, if the state is looking for getting the most bang for its buck, in terms of emission reductions, it would be targeting these pre-2004 vehicles, getting them off the road, and replacing them with cleaner cars, ideally electric vehicles.

Luckily, the state has a program that already does this. It's the Clean Cars for All program. There's a statewide version of it and it's also run effectively through local air districts. So, completely agree with Laura's recommendation to provide greenhouse gas reduction funding for ZEVs, and we would recommend prioritizing the Clean Cars for All program.

The second analysis that I want to talk about starts with gasoline, but I promise we'll get to EVs eventually—just like our transportation system, you could say. So, California gas—California has a unique gasoline fuel blend. It's called CARBOB and it's the only gas that you can sell in California.

And we did this for public health reasons, but it also makes the system inflexible because if a refinery goes down, there's a limited amount of fuel. Nowhere else in the country is making CARBOB And so, that's when we're seeing these gas price spikes.

So, what we wanted to understand was, what is the air quality benefit of CARBOB and are there more effective ways to reduce emissions than this fuel specification? So, what our analysis showed is yes, CARBOB is cleaner than other fuel blends, but what really matters is the vehicles.

And so, going back to the previous analysis, taking the old cars off the road and replacing them with newer ones is a more effective way to reduce emissions than simply our fuel blend. However, for complicated market reasons, you wouldn't want to just get rid of CARBOB overnight.

That could cause the refineries to leave even more quickly, which is not something we want to do at this point. And so, our policy solution is to allow for the sale of non-CARBOB gasoline with a fee and then use that fee to replace dirty old cars, potentially through the Clean Cars for All program.

This would only ever reduce gas prices because no one's ever going to pay a fee to sell gas during times when fuel—when it's cheaper to sell CARBOB, but they would when there's a refinery that goes down and there's a limited supply of CARBOB.

So, this is a way to stabilize gas prices as we make the transition to cleaner vehicles. And the final analysis I want to talk about is harnessing the power of electric vehicles beyond just their use as transportation. So, this looked at the potential benefits of bidirectional EVs that they could have for the grid.

This analysis showed that they could provide $1.8 to $11.7 billion in reduced grid costs if electric vehicles were bidirectional. So, SB 59 from 2024 gives the CEC authority to require bidirectionality on vehicles that are already planning to be out on the road.

Unfortunately, as we've heard from CARB, there's all sorts of federal rollbacks and there's less of a guarantee that these cars are going to be on the road.

So, in order to fully harness the benefit—potential cost saving benefits—of electric vehicles and benefits to the grid and resiliency, we recommend that the CC's authority is expanded to actually require vehicles to be bidirectional vehicles to be deployed.

Now, CARB would of course still need to set requirements and fight for their right to set higher sales requirements to meet air quality standards, but this would at least give us a baseline to rely on—to reduce grid costs and provide benefits to consumers. Thank you.

Thank you so much. So, I wanted to—I feel like there's a little bit of a debate between Ms. Ranger and Mr. Murphy around the level one, level two, and I wonder if we could flesh that out a little bit because I do, you know, I do feel like there is—I have level two, thank goodness.

And it makes a huge difference in your life if you have it, because I use a lot of miles driving all over my district all day and I have to charge a lot. So, I'm not one of those people who can only charge 30 to 40 miles, but a lot of people can.

And so, I see the value of that in a lot of ways. And I think for other situations too. I mean, I park at the airport a lot and I cannot charge my vehicle.

And it's a real problem if I am not going home and I'm not charging and I come back to a vehicle that I've been using all day and doesn't have a lot of charge in it.

And if I could just plug into a level one for three or four days while I was gone, that would be incredibly useful as well. So, can you—I would love to hear from the two of you.

I know you were talking, Mr. Murphy, a little bit about just the confidence and some of it is sounds like it's psychological, it seems like, that people just want that confidence because maybe you have to take a longer trip and you want to be able to charge those, you know, extra miles that you need.

But you know, how do you think we kind of square this out? And I think, you know, in terms of affordability and scale up, it just seems like there's a lot of opportunity around level one to easily and quickly do it.

And you know, we have a long way to go in terms of meeting our, you know, our charging capacity that we need.

Twice you've saved me on this thing. Thank you.

Maybe I should just turn you off.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Turn off the level two propaganda. Level one is a genius idea for airports, but they're a unique case.

Yeah.

And just a quick sidebar, I agree on the two-way charging. That is coming from the industry. There has not been huge popular demand for it. Some of the, you know, it was not a sales spike thing, but it hasn't been a negative.

But if you're in a multifamily or home installation, the level 2 power you need, about the same though it's continuous load as your electric oven or electric washer, is much better for two way because level one basically is the glorified lamp socket, 115 volts, maybe 15 amps.

Level two is five to six times more powerful, which is why five to six times more charging. As far as consumer psychology, the number one things that hold back new and used EV purchases are cost/price and fear of charging and range, which kind of combine. Cost is getting better.

We have a glut of used EVs coming in. That's a downward price spiral. I was over at the auto show. If you look at some of the new product, that Nissan Leaf is going to be a killer at 30,000. GM has a product like that. The Equinox has been their biggest success.

So, I think the price thing is starting to fix itself, and of course, a subsidy would help. But most people, they—Americans, you know, it's a consumer culture. So, if we tell them, well, you only drive 17 miles, so we're going to give you a car you can put 28 miles on overnight.

Now we're tickling the bear here. We find people do not understand how EV charging works. It is a hard thing to get in your head from afar. The most effective sales technique, pioneered by Tesla, but now used wider and wider, is give somebody a car for 12 hours to go play with.

I mean, we have huge dealer problems. We—most dealers, if you're a dealer, how many of you bought a car, when you're walking out with the new keys, the salesperson says to you, now, call me. Here's my card. I have three kids. You're going to get a letter from J.D. Power in a week.

Please give me five stars or I'll never work again. Well, if you're a salesperson on the floor, you're thinking, I put them into an EV, they're going to be waiting two hours at the Walmart in Studio City to charge.

And we're still at a point for all the good news we've heard where one out of seven charging experiences is bad at fast chargers. And when they get that JD Power thing in a week, they're going to murder me and I'm going to hear about it. Bonus time here. So, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to put them in a regular Silverado or F150. So, all the dealer incentives are backward, but we do know there's very little understanding of how charging works. So, when we tell them it could charge you as much as 40 miles in 12 hours, we run into a brick wall.

We know that in the single-family world, where people make a choice to pay over $1,000 to not have to deal with it. So, I, I love it for airports. Anywhere you're stuck for a certain amount of time, like 48 hours, it's fantastic.

But for the salt—to sell more EVs—which is why we exist, and to build American EV jobs, you got to get overcharging, and the way to get overcharging is they know overnight they can get a couple hundred miles. If you don't get over that, you know, you, you have a brilliant public.

We've put in a million sockets, but we're not going to sell any cars, in my view, in our data.

So, I do agree with a lot of what Mike said, but I think that it is important to think about the education component, you know, and so, for a lot of people, if you can get past, you know, if you can educate yourself or get educated by a dealer, and I have to say, I've had recently had one really good experience and one really bad experience where my 80 year old mother was given completely misinformation about charging, told not to charge her car even though she has a level 2 charger in her house.

And you know, said that over and over again. So, I think if we can do a better job of really educating the dealers or making them more comfortable with being able to give the right information, that would be a good step.

I also think it's—we have a huge state, and we have so much difference in all of our populations that with regard to level one charging and multifamily, that may work for some places, it might not work for other places.

And so, if you have people that are comfortable, you know, who know they have a dedicated parking spot and they charge, they park their car every night in their parking spot, they probably would be comfortable with level one.

I mean I don't—and maybe, you know, maybe your research says otherwise, but I think part of it, we just need to educate people too. It's not necessarily the right thing to over build where it's not needed and that's that, and so, my only point is for the state programs that are funded by state incentives, please be open to level one because it's so much cheaper and can get charging in there faster.

You know, in multifamily, it's possible to bolt on level one to a level two centric thing. You know, you can, you can give people the choice. Maybe it's $10 a month for that space.

We just know from five years and billions of dollars shredded in the auto industry that telling people to eat their broccoli and to read the pamphlet they don't need it is a marketplace failure. People buy cars for irrational reasons, you know, and if you can't get the psychology of it done, that's it.

And one thing I...just an excuse, we didn't add it to our stuff, but one of the real pinch points is most people don't understand the economics the average car dealer faces. For a really successful car dealership, 85 to 90% of their fixed cost is covered by the service department.

New car is often a loss leader because they see service down the line. So, when I put somebody into an EV, I'm thinking there's $2,000 of service I'm never going to get. So, we think, well, we give consumers $3,000, they go buy and the dealers make money—dealers don't make money.

And I had the head of one of the CEO of US, one of the big EV participant companies, and I said, what would you do? And he said, I wouldn't give people $5,000 like Colorado. I'd give them 3,000, and I'd give the dealer 2,000 bucks for every unit they move.

And you'd double sales tomorrow, because right now, it's a lousy business for most dealers unless people are lining up pounding on the door in some places to get them. But there's, you know, that service revenue is the key to a successful dealership. And in the beginning, we thought, well, battery replacement.

Well, it turns out we don't need to replace the batteries. They're better than we thought. And the dealers all found out if you take a battery out, you lose your fire insurance.

You got to go build a cinder block bunker for a million dollars in the parking lot to do battery work, because when they're out of the car is the only real fire damage. So, we've really got to get the dealer incentives fixed. And I'll finish with a salute to Ford, which everybody's now going to copy, I think.

They take the responsibility for dropping level 2 in your house and the cost. And that has had a huge lift in sales for Ford. It means they can't incentivize as much because it cost them 1,500 bucks. But when people don't have that problem, it is an incredible accelerant for EV sales.

So, they're doing it automatically when you purchase the car?

Power promise. 90% of the time, they can get level two in your garage unless you have a really crazy power installation. But 90%, they can do it in 10 days. And I think some of the others have figured out, we gotta copy this.

Yeah, yeah. That's great. I mean, I do, you know, to your point, I think, Ms. Murphy, I think, especially at this moment, affordable options that move the ball forward. I think level two, it could be a stepping stone, right?

Or level one could be a stepping stone to level two and create a lot of opportunities for people when technically it does work. But I do think education is a big piece. And, you know, purchasing my first EV, I felt like I needed a course, you know, and there is not a course.

It's a salesperson who may or may not know a little bit about how it works. And then, they send you home to YouTube videos. So, you know, so I think that education piece is a really critical piece.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about interoperability between the various charging locations and apps and the equipment that has, you know, charging access at times. Do you—can you talk a little bit about what progress is being made here and how we're overcoming that? Anyone.

Sure, I'd be happy to. Yeah. I think that the CEC, as Commissioner Skinner was talking about, is doing a lot of great work on the interoperability, working towards a plug and charge standard.

I think that, you know, we still need to do a lot of coalescing around the standards and do more investigating in terms of roaming or network for that interoperability. There are additional costs associated with having the equipment require tap or card readers, as opposed to just being able to use an app.

But the problem with the app, which we saw in the past, before there was legislation on this, was that it's closed.

And so, drivers were having a horrible time going up to, you know, myself included, you'd go to a charging station, you had to find the app and if you didn't have the app and then you couldn't charge and you'd be in the middle. So, we don't support that—going back to that model.

You know, we do want to make sure that there's the ability for every customer at a public charger to take advantage of that charging, regardless of whether or not they have a certain app. And hopefully, we will get to the plug and charge model some someday with roaming capabilities. You agree?

Yeah, I do. The credit card readers have been a problem. On the other hand, you want to have them because I've got like 28 apps on my thing. The first time I went across the country, you know, I wanted to test it and I had a bunch of trouble.

It's all gotten better now, I think, and they're not a donor to us, so I'm chasing them. Electric Era is a smart battery boosted fast charging company that's had some success in California.

They identified a real pinch point, which is you use the credit card reader and the gear works or the chip, but the cellular modem connection it uses to run the card doesn't work because it's a down moment in the cell connection.

So, they actually have a buffer in it where they take the risk that you're going to be good for it if they lose the connection. They got a 97 and a half percent uptime with those fast-charging machines, and so, I think there could be, this is where public policy could help.

There could be a little state guarantee, a little fund to let people take a little risk because you're gonna, you're gonna collect 95% of the cards to get over that cellular problem, which is a hard one to fix in many locations. But the tech is we're on like generation four chargers now that are so much better.

I mean one of California's problems are we were so early. We build a lot of junk, heavily subsidized DC fast chargers that don't work. Pull up at any—go up to five and you pull up and there's a 50-kilowatt unit, which is like nothing, that won't work.

So, the good news is the private sector money's coming in. And I think what Commissioner Skinner said, because I've been—they almost got a restraining order on me at EVGO because I kept looking at this station for three years at the weeds tolerant and it's on Robertson by the 10. It's a beautiful location.

2.0 million bucks of sunk capital. So, I kept threatening if you don't cut the weeds down, knowing Fox News would find it one day, I'm going to go in with bolt cutters and I'm going to solve it myself. So, finally, they're great, and they did, and Commissioner Skinner was a huge hero. But the years it takes.

Here we are, the market with the best penetration, one third of all EV sales. We actually make a little money charging—selling charging services, ish, though the utility side is very expensive, and you can't build the damn thing. You know, so, I think we need a real hardheaded look at those obstacles.

It's weird that even with all the Republican hostility, Mike Dewan in Ohio got the first fast charging stuff up on the highway and here we are, you know, a good blue state that cares about this stuff and we're probably in the bottom 15% of effectiveness at the building charging stations.

And one of—not to put LADWP on the spot on that, but I did just do a tour the other day with LADWP and Burbank Power and one of the—and we were discussing this exactly.

And one of the issues that they raised is that, you know, especially when you're putting in fleets of chargers, you know, and I don't know what qualifies as a fleet. Over four? Over six?

Yes.

Yes. Over two?

Over four, I think.

Okay, okay. So, when you're putting in a fleet of chargers that it's very rare that, you know, trying to plug into the, whatever the line is that goes to that area has that kind of power there, so it becomes a situation where you have to bring power from another location for a long distance. You know, there may be undergrounding.

It's a whole thing. And on top of that, it sounds like the crews that do that work are also doing—getting ready for the Olympics and getting ready for a number of other big events that we're having and power needs that are being, you know, that are coming down the line in the near future.

So, can you talk a little bit more about both the challenges to make, you know, make those connections with chargers more quickly and how you are trying to address making those connections more quickly?

Sure. So, you're absolutely right. It's a whole thing, you know, to get power to these sites, and I think there's definitely—people underestimate the complexity of getting power, especially in a dense urban area where you have to underground. And there's already a lot of other things underground that you might not know about, so.

So, a couple things that we're doing to address those things. One thing that I wanted to emphasize is what, what we're doing, incentivizing these rebates is working—excuse me, incentivizing chargers and electric vehicles is working.

And so, what we're looking to do is also support that by adding some additional incentives to help pay for some of the utility infrastructure that's required for some of these fleet or large charger developments, because that is an obstacle and a hindrance.

And obviously, through some of the money that LADWP gets through the state, that's going to be part of what we use to help incentivize some of that. Plus, we also want to use some of our own budgeted funds to help push electric vehicles in the city, because as you saw, there is that downward pressure.

So, that's one thing. Another thing that we're doing is, you know, as a leadership team at LADWP on the power side, we got together and really kind of focused on what are our top 10 priorities that we need to focus on.

And being that my division is responsible for bringing in new services and the electric transportations program, we were, I guess, number four on the top 10 list of priorities. In addition to that, the distribution system and enhancing that distribution system, which is a critical path item to getting it was on that top 10 list again.

So, that's going to help us manage our resources and make sure that we can get these priority projects in line and executed to support our electric vehicle goals. We also have a number of projects that are specifically slated to—for the Olympics. And so, that's kind of tight intertwined into those top 10 priorities.

And so, that's how we're going to manage it and we're going to execute it. There is limited resources, limited expertise, but through managing resources, kind of surgically managing resources, we believe we're going to be able to handle this. We have the generation capacity. We just need to make sure we need to get them to where the charges and the vehicles need them.

Thank you. And because it is such a thing to bring power to the locations that need it, I wonder if also there's—and not a question because we got to keep moving—but if there's already existing places, locations, that have four chargers, maybe can you put in two more?

Can you put in four more, and expand in those locations that already exist? But I did want to ask one last question about the locations for LA County. So, you had the beautiful bubbles on the map.

I noticed there's not a lot in San Fernando Valley and there are so many bubbles in LA that you can't really see south LA very much. But as I mentioned earlier, Assemblymember Elhawary has concerns about access in South LA.

So, how are the decisions, what's going into making decisions about where charging is going and how do we make sure that some of the areas that haven't been getting it are going to be getting it soon?

Right, thank you for that question. And so, the map I showed you is where we have charging stations today. We actually went through several studies to look at county facilities to identify where the opportunities are. Okay. And we tend to focus on a number of different elements. Number one, does the county facility have enough employees? Okay.

So, we try to avoid the two or four charging stations. We're actually trying to deploy sites with like 20 to 40 or even 100 charging stations. So, all of you there, there's already quite a few chargers at all of you, which is, I believe, in your district.

And there's actually another construction project there right now to expand it to an additional lot. So, it turns out that about 42% of the charging in the county's 1,800 plus strong charging network, 42% of the usage across that network is actually at our hospital facilities. Okay.

So these sites have over 100 chargers stations each at our major sites, like all of you, like lse, LA County General and MLK Hospital, for example. So that's been a very strong focus. We also look at an equity lens.

And so, we went through a study, it's actually online, where we've identified where are our sites that are close to multi-unit dwellings, close to freeways, okay, so that they can also serve, you know, multipurpose for our fleet, for our employees, as well as visiting members of the public. And so, we have quite a few sites identified.

Ultimately, it's a matter of resources, right? I laid out on one of the screens there all the partnerships that we have.

Really commend our partnership with both Southern California Edison through the Charge Ready Program, which is authorized or was authorized by the CPUC, both charge ready light duty, as well as transport, as well as our partnership, Valley DWB, that helps offset some of that infrastructure cost. Some of that, you know, undergrounding into civil work is actually very expensive.

And so, when we do that work, I only want to do it once. Okay. I want to build it out for years to come. And so, that partnership of our utilities is so critical in order to enable us to deploy at the scale that we need.

And so, we're bound to see more, like, almost every other week. I think I've been to three ribbon companies in the last three weeks. And so, we, our team is running, running really fast to get more charging stations out there.

Phenomenal. Thank you so much. Thank you to the whole panel. Really appreciate the discussion and all of the work that you're doing to move us forward, so thank you. And our final panel on commercial vehicles, medium and heavy-duty sector.

We'll bring up—Adam Browning will be first from Forum Mobility, then Rudy Diaz from High Logistics, and Artie Mandel from the Port of Los Angeles, Chanel Parsons from SoCal Edison, and Joseph Liu from the Coalition for Clean Air. Thank you for joining us today. And Mr. Browning, whenever you're ready.

I'm ready actually. I had to push the button to get ready I guess. Ah, well Chair Schiavo, thank you for inviting us all. So many wonderful co collaborators and friendly faces on this panel as well.

I'm Adam Browning, I'm with a company called Forum Mobility and I wanted to talk about this opportunity that we have in front of us right now in California. We are on the cusp of a generational transition to zero emission freight.

I want to talk a little bit about how our company's business model, shared charging and the role that it plays in this. I really also speak on behalf of a cohort of some of the other companies that do similar types of work.

I would like to talk a little bit about the State of play with zero emission freight and then I would like to offer some suggestions, some viewpoints, some opinions on the path forward post acf, post act and I'll need this. So what you see here, actually we got another picture for this as well. Here was our agenda.

The pictures that you have seen here are of FM harbor in the port of Long Beach built with using the electricity from SoCal Edison. We had a wonderful collaboration on that project. It is. Here we go. It is currently the world's largest port based electric truck charging depot. We will hold that record for just a little longer.

There are a couple more depots that are being built as well. It has 44 high speed chargers, 9 megawatts of power and we currently have about 12 different carriers operating out of it. So what Forum Mobility does is that we, we are here to help carriers, the trucking companies themselves make the transition to zero emission trucking.

One of the challenges here is that a lot of carriers don't own their own warehouses or they don't have a 10 plus year lease on those is what you need in order to build your own charging to amortize those costs or they do, but they don't have access to massive amounts of power capacity.

And so what we do is we find places, 2 to 5 megawatts where we can, sorry, 2 to 5 acres where we can find a lot of power and we build truck charging depots as a platform and we provide charging or we'll buy a truck and we'll lease it and we'll provide charging and a truck together as a package.

So our goal is to be a service provider to the trucking carriers to help make this transition as easy as possible. So wanted to just talk in the generic.

What we're looking at with heavy duty trucking looks a lot different from what you See for the public charging for the light duty facilities out there, you'll see here this is a mock up. It's not an actual facility but it sort of shares some of the common characteristics that you'll often see.

So you'll have both bobtail sort of longer term dwell charging where you come in without a chassis and then you also have the pull through chargers generally for more fast chargers where you can come in with the chassis as well. You'll notice that it's gated, it is secure. Like these trucks are expensive.

The freight can be quite valuable as well. You will have the parking for your driver's personal cars. You'll have often the command center with the driver lounge. These are really purpose built different facilities. This is not where you want to drive up with a station wagon and a bunch of kids and pets running around.

You want to keep these generally quite. It's a different thing than the light duty. So you're not going to see double duty in a lot of cases here. I would also point out these are generally powered with a lot of power. These are between 2 to 10 megawatts, 2 to 5 acres.

They cost between 5 and $15 million each. But something like this, this will serve several hundred trucks. So you can pump a lot of trucks through as well. Just want to give a sense of the scale of what we're building and that will also then correlate to the need of the support as well.

I just want to just show some like real world, real world data. This is taken from a recent. This is a program of the North American Council for What 's FE? The Freight Efficiency I believe NAQFI. It's a program of the Rocky Mountain Institute RMI. They test and they run a lot of different technologies.

This is the actual sort of routes of the 4Gen fleet. Geotab data going from the sandpage reports out to the IE running the Volvo VNRs. And as you can see this is like typical drayage runs. This is like. This is what we see.

A lot of the freight that moves in and out of the ports looks something like this. And currently around between 2 and 4% of the of the container movements coming out of our ports are now being carried by zero emission trucks. There's about 5000 emission trucks operating in the ports. It is a success story.

This is actually really working. And one of our customers here, a longtime leader in this space, Rudy Diaz will speak more to this as well. So our, the fleets that we serve right now have are coming up around 2 million miles of zero emission freight. That's a lot of good clean miles under our belts.

I want to talk a little bit about the future here. The Tesla semi represents just a step change advance in both cost as well as capabilities. So this is actual, actual data of a Tesla semi run this fall in the same sort of program through the run on less program.

And you can see it starts in Stockton, that's where it's domiciled. It goes down to Bakersfield, it drops a load. This is run by Sia. Does it charge in Bakersfield? Is there a green.in Bakersfield? No, there is not. This is a truck that is confident in its range.

It goes all the way back and then recharges there. That's the night run, that's about 450 miles, quick charge and then during the day they slip seat it. They run it doing local delivery during the day around the Stockton area. So it is run nearly 24/7. This is again this truck has a 500 mile range.

It charges much faster on the megawatt charging standard, which is a different charging standard than what we've been building so far. And it comes in, we're under NDA but let's just say that that price point is quite aggressive. It comes in a lot cheaper than the current trucks that we have right now.

So this really expands the use cases that we have going forward. It allows for regional delivery, it allows for over the road. So if you're talking about trucks that even originate in the ports, going out to Vegas, going out to Phoenix, that is within reach now. So it again changes a lot.

This is what we've all been working towards. This is like catalytic. And I don't think this won't be just Tesla that owns this lane. Like this will hopefully be catalytic. For all the other OEMs, you know, Volvo, Daimler, they have an MCS truck, a fast charging truck that they sell in Europe.

They haven't yet brought it to the us. So I want to talk a little bit about the path ahead. We as a company were founded under the advanced clean fleets regulation where this was going to be a mandated transition.

I will say that I feel incredibly optimistic about the transition going forward with the shift in policy prerogatives that go instead of the stick. We can really do this with the carrot. Even back under the premise of acf, we never had a sale unless we were able to demonstrate a product that could compete with diesel.

No one was going to buy anything if you couldn't actually operate it at a competitive advantage compared to the diesel. So there are really three buckets of support. First is the truck. So incentives for the truck. Second incentives for the infrastructure and third for the fueling. I'll go through them each.

So the first one, the truck incentives, it's the HVIP program is the, is the real gold standard right now. I would say there's a lot to like around hvip. It has deployed these trucks that we've seen operating so far.

The one of the challenges behind it is so iterative and it is not transparent as to how much funding we have when the funding will be available. And that makes for a very difficult business cycle. So one of our asks here would be to have for long term dedicated funding allocations going forward.

I'll just say that we had a drought of funding incentives. And then this last September there was an opening window utilizing unredeemed vouchers. $322 million worth of incentives were secured in the first eight hours of it being open. There is huge market demand appetite for seeing this happen. You provide the incentives, people utilize them.

So going forward we have right now from the Hino settlement, the Legislature granted this past cycle $95 million again from the Hino settlement, not from GGR funds or anything else that is slated to open later on this year. But beyond that we have 0.0 visibility as to what future funding will be out of hvip. We appreciate hvip.

We appreciate the money that's come to make it more utilizable, to make it more effective. Frankly, just having that long term dedicated allocation, you can be more elegant in your incentive design can show sort of future declines in incentive amounts to make it market more market responsive in ways that you can't if it's just so iterative.

So again really appreciate everything that it's done. It could do a lot more going forward. Infrastructure incentives similarly. So again this is a picture of FM harbor inside the port of Long Beach. And we've had Commissioner Skinner address. We've had a lot of dialogue.

She's the one that controls a lot of the funding via the Energize program and other programs. I would say we would mark call the action here would really to make these again transparent, regular and as well as that a lot more less prescriptive, much simpler. You know, we are dealing with a radically changing environment.

We are all in terms of technology like I said, you know, we've installed a lot of these CCS chargers utilizing the technology for both the trucks as well as the charging that's available now. The next generation. This is similar to like buying a laptop and 2005 came with floppy disks, you know.

And we should, you know, not have regulations that require a CD ROM because we don't know what the next thing is going to be. We are highly incentivized to make sure that these are as utilized as possible.

So long list of just sort of well meaning but constrictive prescriptions that make it harder for us to deploy at the scale and at the speed that we would like to. Would also just say that we would like to see.

It would be nice to have additional funding and we are in very productive conversations with Chair or Commissioner Skinner as well. But you'll see here, you know, the main dedicated funding. And again there's actually more that Commissioner Skinner is dedicating to this. But you know it is $15 million out of 25-26 for heavy duty.

Like, like that's one depot and we have an opportunity for a whole lot more. I really do believe in Commissioner Skinner. She is going to continue to work to build this.

But I would just like to point out that there is a, a much larger need than what we've seen so far in terms of what has been given. Finally the other part is just the fueling and I would like to just point out that the low carbon fuel standard is perennially kind of a political football.

I think it is underappreciated how much it does just for electrification in particular. So just to translate sort of the money, every $100 worth of an LCFS credit translates to an average drayage driver using an electric truck. About $1,000 a month in lower fueling costs. That's real money that really does change the needle.

So we're in a state with very expensive electricity. This helps electric trucking really be competitive. It also provides funds under the FCI program which is a genius program that helps us deploy advance of truck availability. We really appreciate CARB staff and developing that program and that it does eventually will support truck deployment through clean fuel rewards.

So I know that there are consumer impact concerns around the LCFS program. I just. If you want to take another run at changing it, keep in mind it really is foundational to a lot of what we're doing around truck charging.

And there may be ways of tweaking it if you want to preserve the good and get rid of some of the bad. But know that it is really important to this transition going forward. Finally, I'd just like to talk a little bit about the non monetary sort of operational changes.

That can be made to really support, you know, you can make trucks cheaper or you can make them and you can make them more valuable in the market. And so the APM terminal in the port of Los Angeles has a green lane where if you have a zero emission truck, you don't wait.

As a result, around seven different months, it changes depending upon their volume. But between 7 and 14% of their moves are done with zero emission. That is compared to between 2 and 4% of the overall port. If you, you know, utilization is everything.

The less time you are waiting, the more miles that you are running, the more you are making. And it is crucial to be able to utilize these zero emission trucks as much as possible in order to recoup the expense. So there is a lot going on with the leadership at the ports.

But this is a huge, a huge opportunity to just take a negative externality and turn it into a positive. I would also just say that there's an enormous role for the shippers, the cargo owners themselves. You might recognize this good looking guy right up there. But I would.

You know those lime scooters that you see everywhere, they're zero emission micro mobility, but they made a commitment to wherever they can to deploy, using to move their freight, move those when those are imported in via zero emission trucking.

So here you have large electric trucks owned and operated by Rudy Diaz over here moving zero emission micro mobility. The point here is that if you are a trucker and you are considering whether or not to go into zero emission trucking, you know, it's a complicated environment right now.

Freight is kind of down and you need to be able to see this as a pathway to new business. And the more that the cargo owners themselves can say, all right, we will meet you by making sure that if you buy that truck, it will have business. We will give you a predisposition towards utilizing zero emission trucks.

It really helps spin up a virtuous circle that De risks that investment for a company like Height Logistics. And I'll let Rudy talk about it himself. I hope I came in. There we go. That concludes my presentation. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. And Mr. Diaz, since you're famous on our screen here, looking forward to hearing from you from High Logistics.

Yeah, well, I don't think I can say much after Adam already covered a lot of our photos, customers and what we do. But yeah, thank you for having me here. My name is Rudy Diaz. I'm the founder and CEO of High Logistics.

We've been in business for 15 years, operating out of the Port of LA in Long Beach. We're a dredge operator in Long Beach California and in our space we're considered about a mid sized company.

We have between 60 and 75 drivers given the seasonality and over the past three years I've been tasked with transitioning our fleet from diesel to zero emissions. When the ACF rule came in we asked how are we going to, how are we going to do this, how are we going to comply to this?

How are we going to upgrade our fleet From Diesel Electrify it 4 Mobility was a great partner for us. They came in at the right time in 2021 with the turnkey solution. Fortunately for us we had the land that Adam spoke about.

We had the landlord who was willing to give us a 10 year lease on our property. We had power to build out infrastructure in our facility so we definitely got a Head Start.

Yeah so we definitely got a Head Start and started this journey into zero emissions with the hope that it would attract shippers to go zero emissions and support us in that transition. So Today we have 250 emission trucks. We, we have two manufacturers between BYD and Volvo. We have our own charging infrastructure that forum builds.

So we have six chargers on site capable of charging 12 trucks at any given time. So far we've, you know we've gone 600 miles of zero emission, zero emission miles so we've definitely taken a lot of carbon out of the air. And. I'll get to back to this slide.

So I want to speak about our challenges and our opportunities. Definitely very expensive to transition. This is one of the reasons why drayage providers like myself are skeptical of transitioning because it is very expensive.

These trucks are very expensive but the incentives that we have received have been very beneficial to us and we need to compete with diesel on, on, on that front there is limited funding. HPIP has been great. Carve's been super helpful in providing funding as well. Calstar has been a great partner of us, Southern Edison, the ports.

I mean there's really been a lot of funding but you know there's definitely more funding that's needed. Range limitations. These trucks go between 100 to 230 miles so you can't get very far. Luckily for us I would say about 80% of our customers are within 70 miles from the port.

So we can go to the an empire and come back on a full charge but that's it. You have to come back and charge again in order to go back out. So there's definitely range limitations. There's Limited infrastructure to charge these trucks outside of Long Beach area.

So in San Bernardino if you want to find a charging station, I think there's a couple now. But when we first started there was hardly any out there. And then low freight rates. The market is very depressed for us right now. There's a lot of competition.

So we were hoping that by transitioning to zero emissions that we would be able to attract shippers. That's been the case for us, that has been the case for us, but the rates are still very low. So it's making it challenging to spend money on charging on EV trucks, on personnel.

We've had to hire more people to manage these trucks because it's different than managing a diesel. And then the tariffs, the tariffs have been another bomb dropped on our industry where it's made our industry very uncertain. So it's made it very difficult.

So as we climb up this mountain, yeah, we definitely need an oxygen tank because the air gets a lot thinner up there to breathe. But given the challenges, we also have successes. We've definitely had a brand reputation gain by going zero emission.

Lime scooter, who was our first zero emission customer who came to us because we were zero emission. So they signed a contract with us and after that we have five EV customers. So that's definitely given us an advantage over the diesel market.

And I'm 100% sure that if we didn't have the EV trucks we would not be attracting those customers. Recently we signed Samsung as one of our customers and they specifically requested that we use 100% EVs on their shipments as well. For the drivers it's a better driving experience, it's a cleaner truck, a safer truck.

They, you know, they talk about how quiet it is so when they're going home they can probably sleep better. I know those things don't get talked about but the drivers are having a better driving experience overall. They don't have the exhaust when they're doing their pre check on the truck.

Being an early adopter has given us a leg up as well. Because if as this industry moves more towards zero emissions, we feel that we already have the knowledge to operate to troubleshoot the truck versus the charger.

Connecting that connectivity issues that we had earlier on that got resolved over time and you know we, we do compete with the diesel truck when it's a local market, but we're not going to compete with the diesel truck. If the truck's going to Vegas, if it's going to Phoenix, it's, it's very hyper region.

Local I guess if you want to say to that area. So if we're gonna compete with diesel, we're nowhere near close. Adam spoke about the. The Tesla truck that is gonna possibly be a game changer for us in our industry.

And we hope that that truck will open up other opportunities for us with shippers that we cannot touch right now because of the range. So that's definitely something that we're keeping an eye on. And we did.

We were one of the people who took advantage of that additional $322 million, and we did place an order for some Tesla trucks. One program I want to mention here is Invest Clean, where they allow you to scrap a diesel truck for an ev. We've taken advantage of that.

That's how we were able to submit application to scrap old diesel trucks to convert those to EVs as well. And I want to get back to the slide. So we're not only asking that there be more funding and, you know, that we get more money, but we're also contributing to the environment.

I mean, we don't only care about our communities to provide clean air around Long Beach area, around our neighborhood where we live. We're near Signal Hill and California Heights and Long Beach, but we're also giving back. We're supporting the environment.

We're partners with O Ocean Conservancy, where we partner with them so they can continue to do the work that they do with Clean the world's Oceans. We partner with Evertrine. So what we do there is we donate money to Evertrine and they go out and get farmers in Ethiopia and Madagascar to plant more trees.

So as of Today, we planted 4,000 trees. So we know how important it is to receive. But we also want to give back, you know, to the causes that our industry causes. Which is. Which is pollution. And that's it. Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much. And thank you for your leadership on this issue. I know it's hard to make that change, so thank you, Mr. Mandel.

Good afternoon. Thank you. My name is Artie Mandel, and I'm the Director of Government Affairs for the Port of Los Angeles. For the past 25 years, the Port of LA has been the busiest container terminal port in the Western Hemisphere. Last year, we moved 10.3 million TEUs 20 foot equivalent units, our second busiest year on record.

Inside those units was everything from retail staples to holiday gifts that we're all buying. Inputs to domestic manufacturing and exports of California agricultural products. Product.

Together with our neighbors at the Port of Long beach, the San Pedro Bay Ports complex is responsible for 1 in 9 jobs in the 5 counties Southern California region and 3 million jobs nationwide. Even as we've grown those cargo volumes, we've remained committed to a sustainable goods movement future.

Through our Clean Air Action Plan, first enacted in 2006, we've reduced greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions that come from port related sources. In 2004, we reduced those emissions by diesel particulate matter by 90%, NOx by 73% and greenhouse gases by 20% against the 2005 baseline that existed when we started the Clean Air Action Plan.

So we've made a ton of progress. But even while we've seen that progress, there's clearly a lot more work to be done. And a lot of the challenges that are in front of us were laid out in a report that we released recently released our 2024 feasibility assessment for drayage trucks.

This study really showed the challenges that are in front of us. For example, without subsidies, as you've heard, the battery electric truck has a total cost of ownership that's 2 to 2.5% higher than new diesel trucks. And for fuel cell trucks it's 4 and a half to 5% higher.

The study looked at charging and fueling infrastructure in the region and what that can currently support in terms of a fleet. So we have about 800.

Right now that infrastructure can support 800 battery electric trucks with the 462 charging ports and 350 fuel cell trucks with the six hydrogen stations in the region supporting the full transition of all of the trucks that we have regularly calling the port. We're going to need enough infrastructure to fuel 17,000 trucks that regularly call the ports.

That's about 6,200 charging ports, which is 14 times what's currently available. And we'll need 32 hydrogen stations dispensing over 120 kilograms a day, which is five times our current capacity.

So we have a long way to go in order to meet the demand of just the trucks that are serving the Port of Los Angeles on a daily basis. One additional challenge is that zero emission trucks are heavier, about 8,000 pounds heavier on average. So that causes operational issues for trucking companies.

They have to either reduce their payload capacity or make other operational changes. So with all of that, that's a big challenge, not even accounting for the federal headwinds that are in front of us. The advanced Clean Fleets rule, the repeal of the clean Commercial vehicle tax credit, and the withdrawal of the hydrogen hub grant to Arches.

So not all bad news though. At the Port of LA we continue to implement our programs. The Clean Truck program is the cornerstone of our efforts. This has evolved program's evolved a lot since 2006. The earlier program incentivized the turnover of the dirty pre2010 diesel engines to the more cleaner ones that are on the road today.

And then in 2017 when we updated the Clean Air Action Plan, we shifted our focus to going zero emissions. In 2022, through the Clean Truck program we implemented the Clean Truck Fund rate. So this is a $10 per TEU fee on every container that leaves the port on a diesel truck.

So far the Clean Truck Fundraise has raised $150 million just at the Port of LA. So double that for about $3001.0 million million 1.0 bay wide. So that really makes it one of the largest sources of funding out there to support our trucking transition. Outside of federal and state incentives. We've used that money for a variety of programs.

We've made $40 million available in vouchers for zero emission trucks which are usually stacked with HVIP vouchers. And when those two are combined, you get really close to the cost of a battery electric truck equal equaling the cost of a new diesel truck.

We've allocated $25 million for zero emissions charging infrastructure both on our own property and in collaboration with our partners including the South Coast Mobile Source Pollution Reduction Committee. Funding a lot of charging infrastructure out in the Inland Empire.

And we're working on the Invest Clean program as well that the Air District is also rolling out as well as the California Energy Commission and and their NEVI CFI grant. So these strategies have made a lot of progress in the adoption of zero emission trucks in our drayage industry.

The zero emission fleet has scaled from nearly zero in 2021 to more than 600 trucks in our registry today. So that's a tenfold increase in under four years. In the past 12 months alone we've added roughly 250 trucks, which is more than the first two years combined.

And hydrogen fuel cell trucks, which were essentially non existent a few years ago, now represent a meaningful share of the zero emission fleet. We're excited about some of the strategies we're developing for consideration by our board, including additional resources for vouchers. We're evaluating a per trip incentive program for zero emission trucks.

And we're rolling out a $75 million grant program that will combine combine funding for trucks and infrastructure together that we're implementing through a grant we received through the EPA, our Clean Ports grant. So state Partnership is going to continue to be critical as the Federal Government steps back.

We need the state to step up in order to maintain momentum. So we have a few suggestions for things that the Legislature and state should consider to continue to help us make progress. As you've heard, I think over and over again, with no regulatory mandate, the funding for incentives become even more critical to make trucks cost competitive.

The same study that showed that two to two and a half times total cost of ownership for battery electric trucks shows that you can reduce that delta by up to 55% for battery electric trucks with the subsidies that are in place and actually get under the total cost of ownership for a new diesel truck for depot charged battery electric trucks.

So you can make them a better deal than diesel trucks with the right incentives in place. So you know, we're going to. We're urging the state to continue to dedicate a significant share of the discretionary GGRF to continuous appropriation for zero emission vehicles and charging and fueling infrastructure.

We need to find ways to continue to streamline development of charging and fueling infrastructure and expand grid capacity, including CEQA and zoning exemptions.

We want to see the state continue to support local efforts like our clean truck program and the recently signed cooperative agreement between the ports of LA and Long Beach to develop zero emission infrastructure deployment with the South Coast Air District. This collaborative agreement was agreed to in lieu of the south coast adopting an indirect source rule.

And it's going to deliver zero emission infrastructure plans for all sources of port emissions to meet planning targets, including a report on zero emission truck planning infrastructure due by the end of 2029. The Clean Air Action Plan is built on a foundation of collaboration with our private sector and our industry.

The Port of LA is a landlord port. You know, we don't own a single class 8 heavy duty truck. We don't own a single piece of cargo handling equipment. Yet we have made the these aggressive goals to commit to decarbonizing and going to zero emissions on all of those.

And the only way that we can do that is with collaboration with our partners. So we hope the state will continue to incentivize partnerships like the one that we've just recently signed with the South Coast District. And another key piece is to advocate for key policy changes in the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization at the federal level.

We'd love to see an elimination of the federal heavy duty excise check on trucks, which adds 12%, I believe to the cost of every new truck and then address that weight limit issue as well. That can only be done through federal legislation, and then the state can kind of make a corresponding change with state highways.

So thank you very much and happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much, and thank you for all the progress you're making. And Ms. Parson. Yes.

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. And thank you, Chair Schiavo, for hosting this panel and this hearing. I'm Chanel Parson, Director of Clean Energy and Demand Response at Southern California Edison. In my role, I'm responsible for accelerating the adoption and the use of clean energy devices for our customers.

So I manage a portfolio of over $1.0 billion in programs. And when I talk about adoption, I have programs and incentives to support the adoption of electric vehicles, both light duty and medium duty, heavy duty, as well as customer solar and storage.

And when I talk about the use of those clean energy devices, it's really helping customers use those devices for more than their primary use. So, for example, to use it for grid reliability and for savings on energy costs.

So in my portfolio, I'm also responsible for demand response programs, other load management programs like demand flexibility, vehicle grid integration, virtual power plants and the like software.

So, yep, thank you. So Southern California Edison is an electric only utility. We have 50,000 square miles in southern central and coastal California responsible for 15 million residents and 5 million customer accounts. And in addition to that, we are a leader in the transition to clean energy.

So taking a big picture view here, we do write white papers as a thought leader and we did support analysis on what it would take California to meet carbon neutrality goal by 2045. And what we identified is it's going to need very deep electrification. So 90% of light duty vehicles, 54% of medium duty and heavy.

No, let me restate that. 90% of light and medium duty vehicles, 54% heavy duty vehicles and then 80% of buses would be need to be electric in order for us to meet that carbon neutrality goal statewide by 2045.

In order to accommodate that demand, which effectively would be about double the demand, we would need to increase our generation mix by more than double. So that's the solar, wind storage. We also would need to expedite the pace at which we upgrade our transmission and distribution system.

So we would need to 4-10x the pace of our current build out of the transmission and distribution grid. That's if we were to do it how we've always done it, which we don't have the time or money to do it the way that we've always done it.

So we are implementing grid enhancing technologies which are ways that we can more cost effectively and quicker upgrade our distribution and transmission grid. In addition to that, we are looking at also how do we optimize our customer DERs their distributed energy resources to support those needs.

Bottom line though is clean power and electrification is the most cost effective way for California to meet its carbon neutral goals. And not only is it the most effective way for the state to meet its goals, it's also very cost effective for customers and it's just twofold. So one, electricity is a more efficient source of energy.

And so we've done analysis that show for average customer who electrifies by 2045, their total cost of energy would be 40% lower. And when I say total cost of energy, this includes gasoline, natural gas and electricity.

Also the downward pressure on rates, the more electrification on the grid more the lower the cost per unit of electricity is because of the way that the fixed costs are absorbed by all of the additional load on the grid. So our role to enable all of this electrification is twofold.

One, we have to enable the electrification and growth by ensuring our grid is ready. And then two, we do play a Very significant role in accelerating the adoption of electrification. And this is through, through supporting our customers with programs. So I'll start by talking a little bit about the enabling the electrification on the grid piece.

Our objective for our grid is that it's safe, affordable, reliable, resilient and ready to connect new load. And the largest growth in demand that we see in the coming years is from electrification. And this is what primarily from medium duty and heavy duty transportation.

So not only does medium duty and heavy duty transportation disproport, is disproportionately responsible for emissions in the state. The electric version of that also just requires so much more capacity and power than light duty transportation does.

And so we have to be a lot more thoughtful about how we make sure the grid is prepared to serve that load. So the way that we are being thoughtful about that is making proactive grid investments.

I mentioned on the prior slide that we do need to increase the pace of our transmission and distribution grid build out to meet the electrification needs.

If we needed to build a new substation, for example, or we needed to build a new transmission line or a sub transmission line, the current timeline to do a project of that scale is seven plus years. And it's not because it takes us seven plus years to build it.

It takes in some cases years to get the permits, the licensing, the siting, the approvals to start the work. And then some of the equipment is long lead time equipment that you may need to order 6 months, 9 months, 12 months plus ahead.

And so in order for us to, to meet our customers needs, we can't wait till there's a deficit and then they ask us to start building because we'll never make it. So we've identified from a bottoms up analysis where we expect that electrification to show up.

And so for the freight corridors, the truck stops, the warehouses and ports, that's where we are working on proactively upgrading the grid again so that when customers like forum, like Height come to us like the Port of, we serve the Port of Long beach, come to us and say, you know, we want to put this here.

We don't have to tell them, okay, it's going to be a few years before we can actually make that happen for you. What we have identified with our analysis as well is more than 90% of the selected locations are along major transportation corridors or have proximity to the ports.

And then about 70% of those are in disadvantaged communities. So electrifying medium duty, heavy duty transportation that drives through those communities is very advantageous for those communities. What we are doing in addition to the grid enhancing technologies to optimize how fast and how affordable we can upgrade the grid is, we are also implementing innovative solutions solutions.

So we have a ready grid team that is doing things like flexible interconnection. We may have a customer that requests, for example, 5 megawatts of power.

We might be able to say, hey, we can get you 2 megawatts today and then, you know, you can start your project and then we'll build, build it and we'll let you know when you can kind of increase how much load you use.

Oftentimes this works for our customers because when our customers come to us and say they need 5 megawatts of power, it's usually what they need in a few years, right? They're usually phasing their projects in. And so just having good partnerships, relationships with our customers, talking to them early and often helps us to meet their needs.

We're also testing things like mobile batteries and mobile substations again to help energize our customers much quicker.

Now to speak a little bit about how we're working to accelerate the adoption, I will read a statement because I want to make sure I am following ex parte rules and I do want to mention something that's part of an open proceeding. So I anticipate possibly discussing topics relating to open rate setting proceedings at the CPUC.

If there are any commissioners or their staff or any decision makers at the PUC here, please let me know at the conclusion of my presentation so that SCE can take the appropriate steps to comply with ex parte rules governing conferences and presentations like this one. So done that. Now I can speak.

So when it comes to supporting customer adoption, we basically have resources to support our customers before, during and after they convert to an ev. I'm going to talk about the slide a little bit out of order, but I will say that that affordability is critical.

So as far as funding sources go, we leverage the California Air Resources Board low carbon fuel standard funding to do a significant amount of our programming. And this helps supplement, you know, things that are ratepayer funded with that private funding. I'll also say that all of our programs have an equity component. So.

So when it comes to supporting our customers before electrification, we have economic development services for business customers who are looking to potentially start or move their operations to our territory. We have TE advisory services where we'll do EV readiness studies for our customers.

We'll do load management planning for them that can help them understand how to best leverage rate structures to have Kind of the cheapest charging and total cost of ownership. We have online tools for total cost of ownership.

We let customers know where there's grant funding available to help them with the upfront capital cost and purchase of the vehicles. We do rate plan comparisons and then we have a map that we call Dr.

Pep where customers can look and start to identify where we might have capacity and where we might be capacity constrained on our grid. When it comes to during the process of converting to electric, we have a number of programs. Programs. I'll go back to the top of the slide.

Our charge ready transport program does the design, project management and installation of the EV charging infrastructure on both the utility side of the meter and the customer side of the meter. And our target here is to electrify 8,490 medium duty and heavy duty vehicles with this program.

The piece that I want to say related to the open proceeding in is that right now the program allows us to accept commitments through the end of 2026, the end of next year.

But because this market for the medium duty heavy duty vehicles has been much slower, the demand has been much slower between vehicle availability in the beginning to, you know, mixed messaging and confusion about regulations, there's a lot more money left in that program to spend.

So we do have a request in front of the CPUC now to allow us to extend our charge ready transport program until the funding is exhausted. So this is funding that's already been approved. It's not additional funding. We just want to continue to provide this service to our customers until the funding is exhausted.

Our charge ready light duty program similarly focuses on light duty vehicles. We have a Rule 29 that subsidizes the utility side infrastructure for EV charging projects. We have a drayage truck rebate that will give up to $150,000 toward the cost of a new drayage electric vehicle. We have. ZPIF is an acronym.

It stands for Zero Emission Truck and Bus Infrastructure Financing. It's effectively a loan guarantee that allows our customers to finance over 100% of the cost of their EV to also allow them to finance some of the charging infrastructure and other things that they might need and then two that are not listed.

Here is our California Clean Fuel Reward program. Southern California Edison is the administrat administ administrator of the statewide program and we it started as a program focused on light duty vehicles. The next iteration is going to focus on medium duty heavy duty.

We are planning to launch that next year and it will be able to provide up to $120,000 per vehicle for electric commercial vehicles, depending on the class. And then another effort that we'll be launching next year is a shared fleet charging program.

And so this is for companies like Forum who provide charging as a service where you have more than one fleet operating and using a set of chargers. How do we incentivize and support that infrastructure? So on the right is some of the numbers effectively that we have done with our programs alone.

So this does not include single family chargers. This is just from our programs, we've effectively converted about 2,700 medium duty and heavy duty EVs. We have 2.9 thousand that are committed and we have 1.7 thousand that are remaining to be committed if we are allowed to use the charge ready transport funding until the funding is exhausted.

So with that, that concludes my remarks. Thank you.

Thank you so much. That's a lot going on. And Mr. Liu, the final, last but not least.

Yeah, I can tell you we've been here for a while. I'm the 13th of 13 speakers here. I have no PowerPoint slides and I can talk really fast if I need to. So you know. How you holding up? You good?

I'm good. Yeah. Say what you need to say because.

I'm the one thing standing between you and sitting in traffic.

I know. I'm super excited about it too.

Okay. Well, I've been at Coley's for clean air for 15 years as the President and CEO. And we had a board member once, Gary Polakovic, who told me that the way to get to Clean Air is vision, leadership, and a hell of a lot of money. And I bought that for a long time.

And I studied the issue of medium duty, heavy duty, mostly important freight transportation issues. And I added to that vision, leadership, and money, saying that we also need technology and infrastructure. Some of those things are more important than others. The money and the infrastructure are really what I want to focus on today because you're providing the leadership.

Thank you. And we've got, we're pretty good on vision and surprisingly, the technology has advanced tremendously. And what you're seeing with these Tesla trucks, if that happens like they're supposed to, it's a game changer for the heavy duty sector. But going back to the money, we need money. We need lots of money.

As Rudy told you, without that incentive money, it doesn't work for these trucking companies to get to their zero mission requirements and goals. Well, they're not no longer requirements, but the goals. And leaders like height, getting out there, sticking their neck out and Taking that chance, you got to be able to back that up with incentive funds.

And let me talk about a few places we might be able to go to get that money. One is with the Greenhouse gas Reduction Fund, a lot of folks get continuing appropriations. The heavy duty sector does not. We could use that. It's important.