Electric Vehicle Winter 2010 Quarterly Discussion Webinar (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for the Electric Vehicle Winter 2010 Quarterly Discussion webinar presented on December 15, 2010, by Rebecca Harsh and Roland Maliwat, Edison Electric Institute; and Jim Francfort, Idaho National Laboratory.

COORDINATOR: Welcome and thank you all for standing by. Participants will be in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer session. At that time, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star then one.

Today's call is being recorded. If there are any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I'd now like to turn the call over to Ms. Linda Bluestein. You may begin.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Hi. This is Linda Bluestein with the U.S. Department of Energy's Clean Cities program. I welcome everybody to our quarterly Webinar.

I believe this is the third one that we've had so far. We have a total of about 230 attendees on this call, so thanks, everybody, for taking the time so close to the holidays to tune in and listen to what's going on with our program and with electric vehicles and technologies.

And this—today, we're actually—we have a pretty good lineup. We've got Jim Francfort from Idaho National Laboratory who's going to present on the differences in electric vehicle recharging levels, what's available, and what to look for when choosing a technology.

There are certainly a lot of different options out there, and so in a matter of about 30 to 40 minutes, Jim will try to cover as many of those as possible and give you some ideas and tips on what to look for.

The next speaker's going to be Rebecca Harsh with Edison Electric Institute. We think electric utilities are really important, obviously essential partners in any kind of rollout of electric vehicle technology, plug-in hybrid technology, and the related infrastructures.

So it's very important that they're part of the partnerships. And from a Clean Cities perspective, we want to understand how Clean Cities and the utilities can form effective partnerships.

And to that end, Rebecca has also invited on to our agenda Roland Maliwat with Kansas City Power & Light who will actually talk about a real, live example of Clean Cities project that—where they're working closely as an electric utility on electrification infrastructure.

So we'd like to just go ahead and get started with Jim. As a small note, Jim does a lot of work for us out at the Idaho National Laboratory, not the least of which is running the Advanced Technology Vehicle data-collection activities and also working with us to evaluate what's going on in the Recovery Act Electrification Project.

So now, I'll just turn it over to Jim, and he can get started talking to you about the different recharging options.

JIM FRANCFORT: Okay, thanks Linda. This is Jim Francfort, and I'm with the Idaho National Lab. We've done a lot of vehicle testing over the years—about 17 years. We've tested about 1,600 different models of electric drive vehicles.

Let's see here, first slide, sorry, oh, second slide—the disclaimer here is that I'm not going to claim to be the self-professed national expert in this area by any means.

There's a lot of folks that are working a lot harder and a lot more actively on this. We've tried to pull together from different sources the presentation, try to give you an understanding of some of the standards that are involved.

There seems to be a lot of questions and then some of the charging definitions like Level 1, Level 2, some examples of the hardware and some of the installation considerations and then siding considerations.

Okay slide—oh if anyone has a problem with the video connecting or afterwards you want a copy of this, it is already posted on the Web if you go to avt.inl.gov. And if you go to the left blue menu, it says "Publications," and under that, it's under "C" for Clean Cities Webinar.

Okay, slide number 3. So who are the authorities involved? On the automotive side got SAE. They write a lot of recommended practices. JARI in Japan—they've come up with the Japanese fast-charge connector standard, and the International Organization for Standardization, ISO.

On the PHEV side of the connector and the equipment, you've got SAE Standard 1722. And I'll go into that some more.

The International Electrical Technical Commissions—EEV plug-in electric vehicle conductive charging system—they're doing 62.196, which handles the plugs and the socket outlets.

OSHA has—they recognize the different laboratories national—nationally recognized test laboratory, which most people are familiar with—UL, Underwriters Laboratory.

And then you've got the National Electrical 625. I'll go into quite a bit of detail on that and then a little more in the authorities having jurisdiction.

So just an example of some of these sockets that are on the vehicles: of course, the US 1772, which handles your Level 1, Level 2.

And then if you go down to the bottom of that DC 200 amp, there is a hybrid one that has basically two more pins on the bottom. You can see the schematic there.

Then to the right of that, there's the dual socket, which is right now kind of becoming the one used most in the United States also for fast charging in the absence of a 1772 DC fast charge connector.

Okay, slide number 5. So what are some of the published standards? Okay, the 1772, which handles the connector socket connection, the SAE electric vehicle plug-in hybrid electric vehicle conductive charge coupler was first published with in 1996. And that handled the Avcon connector, which is a different design.

It was revised this past December for Level 1, Level 2. And I'll define that later—specifies the coupler and electrical interfaces.

It was—actually, goes up from 32—for Level 2, it's 32 to 80 amp usable. So that's a—basically, it's 40 to 100, but it's 20% D rated for continuous use. So it becomes 32 to 80 functional.

Added the detection circuit for safety and also the lock for the connector—though it can't be accidentally disconnected. And also when you undo the lock, you also break the signal, and you break the charging. That was formally adopted in January of this year.

Slide number 6 hopefully. Okay, so some of the other SAE standards—2836 that describes how the—how this would be used, the use cases for utility programs communications, dash three reverse energy flow, four is diagnostics, five is the customer, home area network, HAN.

Then your detail messages are under a 2847, which again is a new one being worked on, and then they handle how those messages actually occur what the protocol is—same dashes as above.

Slide 7. 2931 gets into the protocols for the physical communication standards. Is it in-band signaling, PLC, Power Line Control, is it wireless, Wi-Fi ZigBee, and it finds how to send those messages.

2953 deals with the operability—how do you test these devices to ensure there's compatibility between manufacturers?

You want to make sure that, you know, if you get a manufacturer, has the onboard female socket and you have a different manufacturer's male connector, will different manufacturers all have the same clearance, tolerance, et cetera, and how do you test that?

Number 8. Slide number 8—so it's in Charging Standards and Progress. 1772 is being reviewed. And we know it was just approved. And that's tightened up some of the standards to include the interoperability I just talked about also to consider adding a DC Level 1 back into the document.

And the big difference between AC and DC really is the AC voltage. You're generally putting power on board the vehicle to—you have the onboard charger. And DC—you're generally going to have an off-board charger.

And also in 2011, they'll be adding for the Level 2, which would be up to that 80 continuous DC connector and also the potential to add reverse energy flow, which people talk about as vehicle to grid or VTG.

Okay, slide 9. Other things going on for mass communication is 2836-2 for DC use cases. General information—2847-2—for how those messages will occur. Detailed information—2931-1—what are the communication requirements for the not plug-in but, you know, plug electric vehicles? That includes pure electrics and plug-in hybrid electrics and anything that's connected to the grid.

2031 is your signal communication requirements, and 2931-3 is your PC power line control communications for those plug-in electric vehicles.

Okay, and also going—not too many more slides with this much information, but there's always a lot of questions about what standards and codes are applicable. So I'm throwing them all out here.

So demands for communications for next year and beyond, like I said, reverse energy flow—what are the use cases? Will there be messaging between the vehicle and the utility for reverse energy flow? Has diagnostics occurred? And what about the customer and home area network, and again, interoperability between the vehicle and the EVSE, which is the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment if you haven't heard that term.

That refers to the off-board piece of power, the equipment that provides the energy to the vehicle. It is not a charger. The charger's on-board the vehicle, but you still have the different standards that apply to the EVSE for the connector, mounting to the wall, et cetera—things like that.

Slide 10—excuse me, slide 11. Okay, the National Fire Protection Association. They manage national electric code. And the applicable code for this is NEC 625. That's the electric vehicle charging system.

And I'm going to read the scope, provisions this article covers, the electrical conductors, and equipment external to the electric vehicle that connect an electric vehicle to a supply of electricity by conductive or inductive means and the installation of equipment and devices related to electrical vehicle charging.

Conductive is your metal-to-metal connection, the 1772. And the inductive was a paddle that we saw in use in the '90s. I think it was the UV1 and the RAV 4 that were the ones that use that.

But we're not seeing that being done now, but people are discussing inductive ways to charge—be it stopping over a pad, and say it's a bus or in your garage. But right now, everyone's using conductive metal, the metal connectors.

So some of the history of the National Electric Code: in 1995, it originated and it's revised; national electric code is revised every three years.

202—it allowed longer cable lengths—I think 18 feet is the length of the cable now—and also options for ventilation indoors because we're seeing lead acid flooded batteries back then.

In '05 it was revised for its neighborhood electric vehicles, which are those vehicles that go up to 25 miles an hour. Also, it addressed the loss of primary power back feed.

So if the utility lost power you don't want energy coming out of the car battery, which could potentially electrocute one of the linemen that was trying to repair the system.

In '08 it was again revised for disconnecting means. So it was—you could safely disconnect if you didn't turn the charger off.

If you want to copy, you got to go to the National Fire Protection Association's Web site and buy one.

And the jurisdictions in the United States, of which there are about 44,000 I believe, they can—they're your electrical inspectors. They can adopt whatever code different year that they want. But they all use the National Electric Code—just different years of what they're using. Most of them are using the most recent, though.

Okay, slide 13. 1625 also handles the EV coupler. What are the grounding requirements? So it's to safely disconnect without turning off the charger, makes—how's it fit, only one way? It has to be unique so you can't—you're not plugging in your vacuum cleaner to your car I guess, constructed to present contact with any live parts for safety.

It also handles on the EVSE. It permits 125-volt, 15- or 20-amp single phase, and it specifies, you know, that does connect to the vehicle, and there is a—even at the 110, 120 volts, you're using a quarter plug set for safety.

For 240-volt Level 2, it must be a permanently connected piece of equipment to EVSE and fastened unless it meets a series of other requirements: 1618, 1619, 1629, which allowed for a, more of a portable, I guess you might want to call it, piece of equipment.

But there are other, you know, standards for National Energy Code Standards. And it also must be UL listed for this purpose, which is a small thing that's very necessary.

The interlock requirements—again, 62518 does require that the interlock de-energize the power going through the connector in the cable when it's disconnected from the vehicle.

And then it is not required for a portable EVSE intended for connection to the 110 volts, though.

So automatic de-energization of the cable under 162519 requires an automatic means to de-energize the cable and the connectors due to a strain.

Theoretically, no one's going to drive away from the charging because the vehicle will be inoperable when it's being connected or is connected.

But there's always a chance the parking brake could fail—something like that. And again, it's not required for the portable EVSE.

Okay, number 16—excuse me, 15. 162522 handles shock protection for personal shock protection. And then the back feed is 1625-25, which is the means again to prevent the electricity from going back on the grid if there's a power loss.

Okay, now we've got number 16 that 2625-26 would handle if the vehicle was used for bidirectional power. It has to be listed—UL listed again—and is suitable for this purpose.

162529—it's ventilation like I said earlier for the flooded batteries. But it's not required for today's batteries because there's no ventilation required. They're not venting at all when they're charging, discharging.

Slide number 17. Future changes are to add in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles specifically, expand to include that smart systems that everyone's talking about for the bidirectional power and information exchange so utility can handle—talk to both the vehicle and the EVSE—can also identify the battery packs.

And so to specify the emissions of hydrogen does not occur or that they're below the 25% of the lower flammable limit, which I believe is about 7%.

Slide number 18. Okay EVSE certification by UL or any of the other. I think there's about seven or eight laboratories in the United States. Then there's other ones in Europe to perform this function.

UL 2529 is a specific test standard for the electric vehicle supply equipment. I'm not going to read the section below. You can read it later if you want.

But basically, it covers, you know, up to maximum of 250-volt frequency. And it's intended to, you know, cover those pieces of equipment that provide power that have an onboard charging unit.

It also will be revised to get it for the ventilation issue, so there is some of the exceptions down below.

Okay. Slide number 19. This gets into your different levels of charging. So according to SAE 1772, the AC onboard vehicle charger Level 1 is your basic household 110 to 115 volts.

That is—and I've got some numbers down below on the time it would take to charge the vehicle. Again, it's a 20 amp max. Most of our households use 15 amp, 20 is de-rated 80% down to—excuse me, by 20% down to 16 amps.

And then Level 2 is up to 240 volt, which is like your dryer except it would be more, you know.I It's 100 amps, which is quite a bit higher. And Level 3 is—does not yet exist. It's proposed.

People often refer to Level 3 as fast charging or vice versa. But what's commonly considered fast charging today is actually DC energy transfer at Level 2 or sometimes 3.

And so there are proposals to make a 1772 handle DC Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3. And there are some other proposals out there, so I'm not going to say this is the way it will end up, but we shall see.

Okay, so slide 20. When you want to pick a charger, you know, Level 1 that 110 volts is great because it's basically everywhere.

It's nice if you have an emergency if you go to grandmom's house and she hasn't thought to put in a charger for your new Leaf or Volt.

For a PHEV where you're putting in about 1.4 kilowatts and if you have a seven or eight charge—kilowatt hour charge—it takes about six hours.

If you have a battery like the Leaf, which is 24 kilowatt hour or a 30 kilowatt hour battery, it's about 24 hours to charge it.

If we look at the Tesla, which I believe has about a 50-kilowatt-hour battery, you're looking at about 40 hours of charging, so it doesn't leave you a lot of time in the day to drive the vehicle.

And that gets into dissatisfaction. So, you know, we've done a lot of PHEV testing of the conversions. They had a 4-kilowatt-hour battery and a Level 1 connector. It took about 3.5 hours, which, you know, which was acceptable for that small size battery.

But as we see more and more bigger batteries, we're going to need I think more and more Level 2.

The Volt has about an 11-kilowatt-hour usable battery. So we're looking at about an 8- to 9-hour charge, which overnight would be fine, but if you try to do any, you know, charging during the day, you're going to get a lot of energy back in.

Level 2, again, it's that EVSE, which is dedicated branch circuit depending, same assumptions on battery sizes, about two hours for a PHEV and then about eight hours for a battery electric.

It also might be good for installing these at malls, movie theaters, or your workplace. You're going to get a couple hours of charge, and you can get quite a few miles back into the battery pack.

Slide 21. So the DC offboard, that's basically your third option: Level 1, Level 2, and then your DC offboard charger for your fast charging.

Most of those will be about a 50-kilowatt power. And so if you had a 20, 25-kilowatt-hour battery pack, it'd be about an hour to fully charge—it would be about a half an hour to fully charge it.

And you get generally about 3 to 5 miles per minute of charge. That's dependent on the efficiency of the vehicle, how you drive it, and a bunch of other disclaimers.

But that's what you're going to see I think if you're in city corridors, intra-inner-city where you're going between cities on highways, if you're going to do this at gas stations or maybe fast food restaurants.

If you go in for 10 or 15 minutes, you know, you can get 10 minutes—30 miles to 50 miles of charge—in the time you spend in a fast food restaurant.

Slide 22. Here's some examples of the different Level 1 of the yellow unit—on the left is from Clipper Creek. The unit in the middle is from SPX. The unit on the right is the Leviton Level 1 EVSE.

The next slide, slide 23. The unit on the top left—the orange cord is Leer. The unit to the top to the right of that is the link from ECOtality, and the next unit third from the left is the Coulomb unit. And all the way to the right on top is Clipper Creek.

The one on the bottom left is the Avcon—oh, excuse me, Euro Environment, pardon me. The middle one on the bottom is the Eaton. And then the ECOtality again is on the bottom right. And these are all for your Level 2s.

Next slide, slide 24. These are some examples of the DC fast charging. The unit on the top left is taking Achen Wade. And the middle one is a fast charger from ECOtality. Top right is Environment Fast Charger. The bottom left is the Eaton, and bottom right is ABB—a European-based company.

Slide 25—installation requirements—going to have to deal with the permitting and inspection groups. They need to probably come out before, or you can get online, and then they can come out afterwards.

There are activities for the EV Project that the Idaho Lab is involved in, and NREL also is doing some work to try to get more of a national standard so people can adopt a more streamlined process.

In some municipalities you can actually go online and get the permit—pay the $40. And other places, you know, the horror stories. The wife of the California Public Utilities Commission chairman took 38 days to get a permit for her to install her at-home charge unit for her BMW electric Mini E. And clearly, that is going forward not going to be an acceptable way if these electric drive vehicles are to be used.

You also need an electrician that's licensed, bonded, and insured. Your circuit requirements for Level 1: you need a dedicated 15- or 20-amp branch circuit.

You, like my house, I have a—my garage has a separate circuit for a ground fault circuit interrupt to the garage. But it's also tied to the three bathrooms.

So if I were to try to charge a car at 110 volt—now what have we got here—flashed up on my screen. Okay, I got a question here. All right, Level 2.

Okay, so Level 2 is that, again, that 240 volt. It's—think in terms of your dryer. That's the type of energy you need.

The difference with the dryer circuit though is that you don't want to be connecting and disconnecting a plug like a dryer on a daily basis because you have those three exposed pieces of metal that it'd be easy to wrap your hand around it. And that's the reason you need all this safety.

And so you would have to have an electrician come in and put it in a separate circuit somewhere in your garage, and then it'd be 80 amp.

And oh, let me go back to my example on Level 1. I'm sorry I got a flash message here that's populated.

But for Level 1, the reason for this separate circuit is my kid's blow drying her hair, has her curling iron on, and I plug in the car: it's going to fail, circuit trip, breaker will trip.

So DC fast charger: you're not going to put that in your home unless you have a lot of money. You're going to—that's what you can see out in the public domain. The police may consider that.

You can either do a series of Level 2 chargers for each vehicle parking spot, or you could have a single fast charger that you can use to charge multiple vehicles. And you also may see that out in the public domain—the gas station example again for the highways.

Slide 26. You need to consider several things when you're trying to figure out where to put public infrastructure. This could be with a parking, you know, garage or street side.

What are people's travel patterns? You know, where they congregate. Earlier, we mentioned movie theaters. Perhaps it may be golf courses. They might fit the demographics of being able to afford the early electrical vehicle.

Local attractions—it could be Sea Worlds, might be a post office, proper charger level. You have, you know, the height of the connector being able to see the screen.

You get into American Disabilities Act. If you're in a wheelchair, what height does the screen have to be versus a 6-foot-tall man or woman that's trying to read the screen.

Security is a big issue. You know, you want to put this in an area with good lighting for safety purposes if you're just going to be there for, you know, say, a fast charge.

Signage is a real issue. And that's something people are trying to figure out—what should the electric vehicle sign look like?

One of the states up in the Northwest—I can't remember which one—is doing away by legislative regulation with gas signs on the highway.

And so, you know, maybe we're worrying about signage. In some states, you're not even going to be allowed to use them—kind of surprising to hear.

Are you going to let the public access it or just the fleet access? And also work with the local—the building inspectors—to understand if there are any specific requirements.

You know, and going back to the American Disabilities Act, basically, that says the first connector you put in has to be handicap accessible.

Slide 27. This is an example of signage up in Portland—I guess multiple signage for a connector that—excuse me, an EVSE that's Level 1 that's on the street.

And then I'll show you the result of the signage. Slide 28 is that car there parked with the ticket under the wiper. It was not an electric car, and it decided to ignore the signage, and it was not using the charging station.

And I put this in here for another reason, too is, you know, this is an industry that everyone's trying to figure out the infrastructure.

You know, there are a lot of applications that are going to be available for manufacturers and private companies and charging infrastructure providers that'll tell us whether or not someone's using a charging location by whether or not it's connected.

But it's not going to be able to tell us whether or not someone's parked there. That may be something we need to think about to consider.

Just finally, there's a Web site again that the presentation's on. There are a lot of fact sheets out there on testing. And there's also a report on PHEV infrastructure—also some examples of costs.

Something to think about—it's not just the hardware cost but also the installation where you place these connectors.

If you're putting them somewhere that has, let's say, you know, multiple hundreds of feet to cut concrete to bury the lines, it'll be very expensive.

I think the first thing to do is look at your service panel. You put it close to that. Is the service panel able to provide electricity for whatever you want to connect, or do you have to get utility to put in, you know, another transformer, which may be a possibility also.

There are a lot of things that, you know, will play out as we go—move forward, including things such as, like the local transformer in a neighborhood.

Your average house uses about a 1.7-kilowatt rate of electricity on average. And we're talking about the Volts and the Leafs. They have a 3.3 onboard kilowatt hour.

So by installing the vehicle, you're basically tripling your demand at your house. Will that be transferred into the local transformers being overused or possibly even—you know, over time it may not cool at night because theoretically, you're charging off peak—lower rates and the life of the transformer. And that's again something that's an unknown that hopefully through research we'll be able to answer some questions like that.

Linda, I'm going just hang on, and I guess and we'll get questions.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay, that's great, Jim. Thank you very much.

JIM FRANCFORT: You're welcome.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Again, we're going to hold questions till the end. And now we're going to skip ahead and go to Rebecca Harsh who's the director of consumer and retail energy policy for the Edison Electric Institute.

And again, we invited her to talk about how electric utilities can partner with various partner shops—partnerships including Clean Cities to develop the marketplace and communities for—and get them ready for electric drive as well as plug-in infrastructure.

So EEI is the Association of U.S. shareholder-owned electric companies. Becky leads EEI's internal and external consumer initiatives related to energy efficiency and efficiency solutions to climate concerns.

She works closely with EEI members, congressional staff, seat commissioners, consumer advocates and federal agencies. And she provides them with education and advocacy materials, analysis of industry data, and information on possible major policy, technology, and consumer changes, and also identifying the impacts on utilities and potential proactive strategies.

And she's going to do the first portion of the presentation, and then we're going to turn it over to Roland Maliwat who's the manager of sustainability for Kansas City Power & Light.

In that position, he has had the responsibility for overseeing KCP&L's renewable and affordability programs—mainly low-income weatherization and affordable new homes.

And he comes with great experience in the electric utility industry that includes nine years with this particular utility in the form of Keyla Companies.

Prior to that, his responsibilities with the Keyla were as a business analyst and manager for quality for customer share. He received his bachelor's degree in science in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri.

And I'd also like to say that he is a partner in the Clean Cities partnership in Kansas City, which I'm sure he will talk about—outline what they're doing. And he'll be directly after Becky Harsh.

And so I think, Becky, when you're done, we'll just turn it right over to Roland. Thank you very much and, Becky, please start.

REBECCA HARSH: Thanks, Linda. Thank you very much, yourself and Sandra, for giving us the opportunity to participate in the Webinar today and to share some of what the utilities have been working out with respect to electric transportation.

As Linda mentioned, okay, my slide is not advancing. Okay, sorry, just a second.

SANDRA LOI: You're on slide 2, Becky.

REBECCA HARSH: Yes, but that's not my slide 2. That went back to the...

SANDRA LOI: Oh, okay.

REBECCA HARSH: ...Jim's presentation. When I hit my arrow, it takes me to—there I am.

SANDRA LOI: There you go.

REBECCA HARSH: Okay, sorry. Sorry for the technical issues. Just really quickly, as Linda mentioned, I work for Edison Electric Institute. We are a trade association representing investor-owned electric companies.

Many of our companies are combination gas and electric as well as electric only. And our members represent about 70% of the U.S. electric power industry.

I just thought what I could go through today really quickly is kind of give you all an overview of what utilities have been working on in the pursuit of advancing electric transportation.

First of all, I guess I should say that we've actually got a really strong commitment from several of our member companies to making electric transportation a priority.

Back in 2009, we organized a working group. Our purpose was to provide information and feedback and networking opportunities among our members to discuss what was going on in the electric transportation field and then also to start collecting information and highlighting some of what issue—or what efforts the utility industry has been focusing on.

We started back in 2009 with about 19 companies as part of that effort. To date, we now have over 43 companies. And we also have about 180 participants that we've organized a working group to look at a lot of the different issues with respect to electric transportation.

We've organized issue teams around the infrastructure issues around codes and standards, policy issues, communication and media, as well as rates and regulatory issues. So as I mentioned we have over 180 utility people who are currently addressing some of those issues.

A lot of what we're also working on is making sure that our system requirements are what they need to be and to minimize any potential load impacts.

Companies, specifically those in the phase one launch markets out on the West Coast and in the Arizona, Portland, Washington area—they've been very active in checking to make sure the additional system route, system reliability, and load carrying improvements have been made as well as evaluating what type of neighborhood distribution improvements may be needed.

In addition to that, several of our companies are mapping and trying to target some of the likely early adoption areas using existing—some of the hybrid car purchasing data, customer surveys, and just some general demographics.

They're working with groups like the charging station installers, car dealers, code officials, and permitting officials to develop and advance notification programs to alleviate any potential grid impacts.

In addition, we're working with companies like EPRI to run impact studies just to make sure that the current studies that are out there with respect to the impact of this technology is safely to say two to three cars can charge currently per transformer that exists right now.

And a lot of our companies are just trying to make sure that that remains and that if there are any older or near capacity transformers out there, they're trying to go ahead and get those identified and move those into the rotation of being replaced.

In addition, we're working on some regulatory strategies both with rate options developing new types of rate structure—what's working incentives for customers.

We're also working with groups, working with regulators at the state level to ensure that those—the rates that are put in place are beneficial to customers as well as helping to promote widespread adoption of the electric vehicle, looking at different types of business model opportunities, evaluating if we actually want to get into the charging business public versus private.

We—I think the majority of our efforts at this point are focused on the private charging portion of this and making sure that the neighborhood grid reliability issues are taken care of.

But there may be some additional opportunities in the public sector and making sure that that's done correctly as well.

We're committing to electrifying our fleet both with on and off-road vehicles, incorporating new mass-market vehicles into fleet operations, bucket trucks, lift trucks, as well as just the neighborhood electric vehicles that you might see on the road.

In addition we're working to get our customer people internally within our utilities ready to answer questions from customers, putting together Web sites and promotional materials to help educate customers and move them in the right direction, also providing training to some of our customer service personnel. That would be your call center people, educating even down to your billing and payment groups and some of your meter-reading people.

If they're out there in the field and they have contact with customers, we're trying to make sure that as many of our customer-facing personnel have as much information as possible.

In addition to all the work that we're doing internally we're doing a lot externally as well primarily through our partnerships and collaborations.

Currently, many of our member companies are already actively involved with partnerships in auto companies—GM, Nissan, Ford—working with research groups like EPRI, partnering with GE.

Many of our companies are part of the EV Project as far as the ECOtality. We're doing a lot of outreach to local government leaders creating collaborate—creating collaborations within the territories with local government officials, building code, and electrical inspectors, you know, universities, dealership—just trying to make sure that all the people are at the table and that everyone is on the same page as far as the progress of the electric transportation.

We're also doing a lot of work as I mentioned earlier. We have some groups that we've put together—some issue teams that are addressing specifically some of the codes and the standards issues and making sure that that permitting process and that the installation process of private charging stations is seamless and easy for customers.

I think one of our main priorities is to create a very positive experience for customers who are—who want to install these types of charging stations and want to purchase these types of vehicles.

National associations we're working with: the Electric Drive Transportation Association, Electrification Coalition. Those are two probably of the leading policy-driven associations.

So we are working with them to find opportunities at the federal level for legislation that is supportive of electric transportation.

As I mentioned, EPRI is doing a lot of the research. We're partnering up with the National Rural Electric Co-op Association and the America Public Power Association to make sure that we include all type—all areas of utility experience.

As far as what's next for us, we are continuing to move forward. We have several different initiatives working here at EEI right now as I mentioned. Again, the issue teams are looking at the different opportunities and infrastructure. And that's just not on the charging side; that's also on the system—the grid system reliability issues.

The policy piece is big right now with the new Congress coming in and all the recent turnover from the election. So we're trying to get into the state legislatures. We're trying to work with the governors' offices trying to get up on the Hill and educate staffers.

And at this point, it's just general information about the technology itself. But at the regulatory level as well, working with NARUC—I don't know if you all are familiar with that—the National Association of Regulated Utility Commissioners.

Those are the people who have to help us as we want to set policies that are in support of electric transportation, new rate structures, improvement to our systems.

We have to get buy-in from our commission. So we've been working closely with a lot of the members of NARUC to do a lot of education and outreach.

We do have still several challenges. There is a general lack of data. The cars haven't— they're not a—there's not a lot of cars on the roads right now, so we haven't been able to collect as much data as we'd like as far as penetration levels and what the true impact to the grid may be.

There's also just a general lack of education and understanding about the technology itself. What's the difference between a plug-in electric hybrid and a pure electric? And, you know, how do the batteries work, and how do I get—there's just general lack of information out there that we're working with a lot of the other stakeholders to get that information to the customers and to the opinion leaders and the policy makers.

Lack of technology I would say is much more on our side, the utility side in that there are—there is some technology out there that would help us as we try to manage the impact—manage our load better as more and more of these cars come to market with the advanced metering infrastructure that's out there.

But not all of our member companies are interested or able to adopt those new types of metering technologies. So we're trying to figure out different ways that we can continue to manage that load and mitigate any potential impacts.

There's a lack of established business models out there on how we handle some of these new issues. As I mentioned before, utilities are looking at the public charging component and if there's an opportunity to be—roll that into some of their business models.

And there's a question of the sale for resale. I don't know if any of you are familiar with that. It's if you have a third party out there who is owning and operating and maintaining the charging station, it creates a sale for resale of electricity.

And so we're having to go through not only regulatory laws at the state level, but also, you know, it involves FERC. So we've got to kind of work through some of those issues.

And then finally, there is kind of a general lack, or I should say more of a reluctance, on the regulatory side and on the legislative side to fully embrace and support this technology.

And I think it has a lot to do with history. You know, many of the people who are involved in this market now have seen this come and go 20 years ago, so they're a little reluctant to dive back into the pool.

Regulators—some of our regulators are still struggling with how is this utility issue? You don't sell cars. And, you know, it's difficult at the state legislative level to create and encourage non-financial incentives that are easy on the budget but can also help to advance more widespread acceptance of electric transportation.

So there's still a lot of challenges out there, but I would say that utilities are continuing to move forward, reaching out to new and different people every day.

My working group is growing. I would say in the last six months I've more than doubled the number of people who are participating.

So we're doing what we can keeping up with the market as much as we can to make sure that our primary concern is to make sure that the—our grid is able to absorb any type of impact from this type of technology.

So with that, I will turn it over to Roland, and he is going to give you some very specific examples of what KCP&L has been doing specifically with the Clean Cities program.

ROLAND MALIWAT: Thanks, Becky. And I like to thank everybody on the phone—Linda and Sandra also for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today.

First of all, KCP&L, Kansas City Power & Light, is the—they're a regional utility in the Missouri and Kansas area. We serve electric service to retail and commercial customers of—number nearly 900,000 customers on both sides of the state line.

We've been involved for a long time with Clean Cities for our different projects, namely fleets and some of the other opportunities they've offered there. And this is our first foray into the alternative fuel area for this project, or with Clean Cities, I should say.

I'm going to try to advance this myself now. That went the wrong direction.

So we applied for our grant as a sub-awardee, I believe it was around this time, a little bit prior to this time last year, 2009, with the aim of promoting the delivery and acceptance of electric vehicles in the greater Kansas City area.

Now, many of you may be aware that Kansas City's not one of the phase one cities for receiving electric vehicles.

So herein lies a lot of challenges that we had with putting infrastructure in the area without the knowledge of when delivery would happen for our vehicles.

You know, at that time we knew there was about seven cities, you know, the coast et cetera that were going to be receiving cars through the fourth quarter this year and, you know, targeting the Leaf and the Volt.

And I think many of you have read today that Chevy finally loaded up vehicles in Detroit to take to deliver to customers throughout the U.S.

So that was nice that both Nissan and Chevy were able to at least hold their fourth quarter commitment of delivery of vehicles.

So our goal initially is to install 10 Level 2 charging stations. And on the outset of the project, we were considering providing public access to different facilities within our service territory itself, giving customers access to the charging stations by having them located at different types of facilities, service centers, et cetera.

But as we really started to dig into the project and understand the commitment that we needed to make as a utility to help promote this and get use out of the charging stations, we realized that facilities that were a little bit off the beaten path and maybe localized within industrial areas of our city were probably not the primary areas where customers would go and leave their vehicles for, you know, one, two, four hours to charge at a public time.

So we really had to shift gears. And this happened after we were—we receive the award for the contract and really identified a different way in which we could implement the installation of 10 charging stations.

So as we started doing our background research as most have done is we wanted to find out really what the target regions were.

And they came out to us. And, you know, it made sense that retailers and some manufacturing, banking, education, et cetera were really what we would consider destination locations where it was likely that number one customers that would not have a problem leaving their vehicle charging and parked for, you know, a few hours as well as they may be located in areas where customers would go to, you know, of the destination.

So with that, we identified eight large corporations within the Kansas City area as site host partners. Our plan was to install—our plan is to install public Level 2 charging stations that are capable of charging two vehicles at one time.

So as you're probably wondering, we have 10 stations that we're going to charge, but we have eight locations picked.

So we do have a couple of locations, namely a shopping mall and a community college, that would be receiving more than one of the charging stations.

But by giving or putting the requirement that the charging stations be able to charge two vehicles at one time at least gave the other partners the opportunity to provide services to more than one customer at any one point in time.

Some of the other requirements that we were putting on the equipment is obviously if it's J1772 compatible because we're looking to charge the vehicles that are going to be delivered from the auto manufacturers—not the growing number of hybrids and conversion kits that we have in this region. We wanted to make sure that we were working for the mass market.

And it kind of goes back to Jim's comments about wanting to bring up the idea of the—what do we call or what is the standard signage for electric vehicle charging stations?

You know, we've been struggling with that internally as we're trying to wonder or understand how we need to promote these charging stations to customers and let them be aware of exactly where these locations will be at.

We're waiting to hear that. We have some ideas on our own right. We have some—even some graphics that we'd like to use. But we're hoping that at some point a national symbol comes out that we could use to paint on the parking spaces as well as to put up in the signage in the locations that were—that we've picked.

Advancing, okay, so the Clean Cities with the project—you know, we always have issues and opportunities. And so to take a look at that we'd like to clarify a couple of issues that we have.

So we received a grant award earlier this year with the idea that we spend it by the end of December 31, 2011, which is nearly a year away from now.

We had thought that we would have all of the money spent by December of 2010, but it looks more like it's going to be July of 2011.

It's amazing how difficult it is to give away free money and free things to customers to—we've selected as site partners.

There's a lot of DOE pass-through terms and conditions that we've had to provide back to our site partners as we're calling them. And some of them are pushing back, and that creates a little bit of an issue on agreement on the site hosts, which we are trying to finalize before the end of the year.

Another issue is ownership and maintenance of the stations after the monitoring period ends in 2013. Initially through '13, KCP&L will maintain and own these facilities.

Based on our learnings and some of the data that we collect over the three-year period we've left the provision there to transfer these ownerships over to our site partners.

Again, it leaves that kind of unknowing period of time where the site partners are not sure that they would want to have that open-ended term.

This has really created a number of issues for us because the considerations might be or the disagreement might be enough that some of our customers may opt not to participate in this program.

Finalizing site agreements with eight individual partners—I know I'm kind of reiterating that, but it's been a very long and arduous process. It's probably longer than our negotiations for our Clean Cities contract in itself.

It's difficult to create one generic site agreement for eight individual partners. Many of them are having considerations about location, term of use, accessibility—24 hours seven days a week for customers partnering with us to return the information that's required to the Department of Energy on a monthly basis—branding rights, trademark infringement, et cetera.

So there's a number of things that should be considered when you're selecting your site partners in developing the site host agreements between yourself and that group.

And then finally another issue that we have is utilization of charging stations without vehicles. We believe at the earliest vehicles will be delivered to the Kansas City area maybe in the late spring, early summer of 2011, which doesn't seem like too far off. But it's a possibility that we would have these 10 facilities in the ground by late winter, and they would be sitting idle until the vehicles get here.

So it's kind of the cart before the horse question of whether if we put them in, does it drive adoption of vehicles, or should we wait until vehicles get here and to provide the service? So that's yet another data point that we're trying to figure out but some opportunities we've had.

One of the great things that happened is about the same time that we received the grant was that Rocky Mountain Institute's Project Get Ready project got kicked off in the Kansas City area.

So we've been able to coordinate that planning because KCP&L was representative not only on their RMI project but also with the Clean Cities project.

So it's nice to take a look at very, very broad planning for the city to draw the delivery of vehicles and show that the Kansas City area region is doing its due diligence to be prepared along with having the very microscopic view of we've got 10 facilities that we've got to—we have to locate.

So with the ability to do that preplanning from a very broad sense, we've been able to select site partners that would provide us—provide our customers a means to travel from the extreme southern part of our service territory to the extreme northern part of our service territory, basically creating a, I guess you would say, the pit stop locations along the way.

We can go about 150 miles in one direction, and along the way, there's a number of charging stations that our customers will be able to utilize.

We had an issue initially. As I mentioned, we were going to use property is part of the expense or part of our company's match towards the grant.

And it became apparently aware to us as we went through the process with Clean Cities that there was difficulty in dealing with the property.

Basically, at the end of the term of the grant, the government would have some rights towards that property. So we immediately had to shift gears and figure out how KCP&L's in-kind contribution towards the grant was going to work.

Fortunately for us, our Clean Cities partnership really identified the opportunity with in-kind contribution from intellectual capital and basically our labor resources toward planning and implementation of the project.

So we got over that hurdle, but it was really kind of an interesting setback for us.

Another thing that would be important opportunities to note that the technology and industry are new. As Becky had mentioned, there are a lot of things that we don't know.

And we're trying to plan and implement at the same time trying to catch up, and from a retail perspective, car manufacturers have had four years to plan these things.

I read today that the Chevy Volt was in planning for four years. So they've had over four years to get a vehicle to us, and we've had roughly about 18 months to try to put charging stations in the ground.

So the technology in the industry is new, especially when you get to the Midwest—we're not the most progressive. We're not California, and we're not doing some of the things that they've been doing for several, several years out there. So it does require a lot of planning.

And one of the requirements with our grant or our being the grantee was that projects needed to be shovel ready because they were part of the ARRA funding.

In this case, we're into the, you know, 17th month or the 14th month from a—from a location to award. and we're still at a very late planning stage of this and have yet to select and pick our vendor.

So it's not—I wouldn't really consider this to be a shovel-ready project. And I think it should be considered that way when somebody—if grants come down in the future, that should be something that should be considered as you talk about this alternative vehicle project.

And finally there—several of the grants that we've worked with have not required the level of transparency that's been required. And not that that's wrong, but it's just again what we were used to working with and the transparency that was required before. This is a heads-up to that game a little bit.

And so again, with planning on the fly and implementing on the fly, we found ourselves in that mode quite more often than we'd like to.

So I guess my thoughts were that although the project is moving along a little bit slower than we'd hoped, we've been able to move along and keep the process progress going to where we believe we're going to meet a lot of our commitments for the grant and ultimately be able to implement our 10 charging stations before the end of 2011 in time to meet some of that early delivery with the vehicles coming from both—from all of the manufacturers. Thank you very much.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Hi. This is Linda Bluestein again with DOE Clean Cities. And I'd like to thank our speakers very much for what I thought were some very insightful presentations.

And I would like to open it up for questions. I'm going to ask if the conference coordinators can go ahead and do that.

COORDINATOR: If anyone would like to ask a question at this time, please press star then one. Please un-mute your phone and record your name when prompted.

To withdraw a request once in queue, you may press star one. Again it's star one to ask a question at this time.

SANDRA LOI: I, Linda, I have a question that came in via the Web if we can—I can go ahead and read this to you while we're waiting for the phones questions to...

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Sure.

SANDRA LOI: ...come through. This question is actually directed at Roland. It's, let's see Wes Sites. We understand that KCP&L has some medium-duty electric trucks from Smith Electric Vehicles.

How is the experience working, and what is KCP&L doing to prepare for and/or promote commercial fleet adoption of large electric trucks?

ROLAND MALIWAT: Yes, we do. We have I believe three vehicles. We have a bucket truck and two delivery vehicles from Smith Electric.

They've been working fine for us. I think that we've had those in service for between six and nine months. Again, that was another DOE project that we participated on.

We're also working with EPRI to take a delivery of—I would call them more mass market vehicles for some of our fleets and trucks et cetera that are going to come online here within sometime this year.

So we're doing a lot internally as far as promoting EVs and alternative vehicles. Right now, we've got the bucket trucks, and we have the EPRI vehicles coming.

But even before that, we've had some of the Ford hybrid electric vehicles onboard. And we've been heavily working with alternative vehicles as a corporate philosophy for several years.

SANDRA LOI: Great, thank you. Alexi, do we have anyone on the phone line with questions?

COORDINATOR: Yes, our first question is from Frank Sinseltz.

FRANK SINSELTZ: Hello, can you hear me?

SANDRA LOI: Yes, we can.

ROLAND MALIWAT: I can hear you.

FRANK SINSELTZ: Okay excellent. Are there any federal rebates for purchasing charging stations which were due to expire?

JIM FRANCFORT: I think it's a tax credit at...

ROLAND MALIWAT: Two thousand dollars per home.

JIM FRANCFORT: Two thousand dollars for a home and up to 50,000 for a public one that's public—any publicly—and the tax credits.

FRANK SINSELTZ: Okay, do you know when those are set to expire?

JIM FRANCFORT: I think the end of this year. I think there's an effort to get them renewed in Congress, but I don't think it's happened yet?

FRANK SINSELTZ: Okay, thank you.

JIM FRANCFORT: I'm not, you know, the IRS would really be the guys to talk to on that one?

FRANK SINSELTZ: Thank you.

JIM FRANCFORT: You're welcome.

COORDINATOR: The next question is from Carl Wilkins.

CARL WILKINS: Hello, this is Carl Wilkins, Quanta Technology. This is for Jim. Jim, do you have a library of electric vehicle charge profiles that you could provide someone looking at those grid impacts of these vehicles?

JIM FRANCFORT: You know, there's a couple presentations, but they are for the Hymotion Prius, and that was at the Level 1.

We have not—we do have fact sheets on the Web for the past electric vehicles under the baseline performance testing, and they have maximum power but not the actual profiles.

CARL WILKINS: Thanks. Do you—I have a follow-up question if you don't mind.

JIM FRANCFORT: Sure.

CARL WILKINS : Have you looked at the power factor of these charging stations?

JIM FRANCFORT: As far as the efficiency?

CARL WILKINS: Yes, well the efficiency and the power factor whether or not they're a unity power factor or at what are their power factor? Is it unity when they're charging?

JIM FRANCFORT: I don't think we have. I don't remember any...

CARL WILKINS: Okay.

JIM FRANCFORT: ...that's been.

CARL WILKINS: Thank you.

COORDINATOR: The next question is from Dave DuVal.

DAVE DUVAL: Hi. Dave DuVal, Fairfax County Virginia. The Edison Electric presentation—one of the points was that there's a lack of established business models for, I think—than for public access charging stations. And I wondered if that's one of the things we are wrestling with?

And I wondered if KCP&L can give us any insight into what seems to be promising in the way of business models for public access stations both—and I'm interested both for commercial ownership and local government ownership.

And when I say business model, I'm talking about who owns it: how do you cover the expense of not only electricity but the capital and operational and maintenance of the station, what are the security issues, the liability issues if it's public access, how those get covered?

ROLAND MALIWAT: That's an excellent question, and I know that I referred to our site host agreement that we call the SHA around here. It's our little four-page legalese document that we put together and addressed every single one of those.

Number one: the state of Missouri and Kansas are very, very similar in the rules around what we call retail wheedling. It's the resell of energy. So premiums put on that either by the utility or by a third party are not necessarily allowed.

So I know that in California they recently had some rulings that are allowing the charging station owners to do some options around that. So in Missouri and Kansas, that definitely is not an option.

So in all likelihood in the short term, the one model that may work—again we would have to seek our regulatory approval on that—would be a hoteling fee of some sort. That's where they pay a nominal fee for the number of hours that they're parked there, so it's not necessarily tied directly to the energy usage itself.

And that's pretty apparent. If you go to the airport right now, you can see the little quick charge stations where you drop in two or three bucks and you can put your phone or your laptop on there and basically charge your phone up, you know, for a nominal fee and hasn't—and it's not tied directly to the energy.

Regarding maintenance and operations of that, KCP&L is going to assume that with our project for the next three years, our grant ends December 31 of 2013.

So we've got in the provision in our SHA again that we will maintain it within reason. We have definitely designed the line between us and the customer at the point of where electricity enters the charging station because it is tied directly to their service.

As a note on the business model part, the agreement was that the business partners pay for the energy, and it's not sub-metered for them.

So they are willing at this point to take advantage of number one, a free charging station from KCP&L and Clean Cities.

And number two, the opportunities to be shown as highly sustainable and green and promoting of EV vehicles through all that promotion that it was worth the idea of the energy that would be used.

And frankly speaking, we've run some numbers based on our kilowatt-hour cost of energy in the Kansas City region. And if we had a vehicle charging at Level 2 24 hours a day, seven days a week at some of these stations, their bills would range anywhere between, you know, $20 and $40 a month.

And so the companies we picked all have bills that run $15,000 to $25,000 a month. So that was like a drop in the bucket for them, so it was easy for them to understand that.

And security with being accessible 24/7, I think that was another thing that we—I know that is another thing that we included there that we wanted to make sure that, you know, that they provided onsite security, et cetera.

So there's a lot of things that were required. I think that I would share some information with those that are interested.

But when we pulled the team together that was designing the SHA, that included everybody from our insurance folks to our security folks. And this is how all of the little areas were brought to the surface to make sure that not only KCP&L and Clean Cities were protected but that our site partners were also protected.

DAVE DUVAL: Is it possible for us to get a copy of it or outline of it or something?

ROLAND MALIWAT: I would think that we could be able to do that. I would have to check with our legal department, but I think that we could give the highlights in one framework or another.

DAVE DUVAL: Okay, I appreciate that.

ROLAND MALIWAT: Thank you.

JIM FRANCFORT: Linda, this is Jim. If I could interrupt the questions for a second. The earlier person did ask about the power factor, and I was wrong.

We had done power factor testing. We did the chargers in the '90s on the board vehicles. And for the conductive, I happen to look at the first six conductive charge vehicles. The power factor ranged from .97 to .999. And the two inductive ones that had inductive charging—they ran from .828 to 1.0.

And if you go on the Web site again to avt.inl.gov, go down to the left bar down to the full-size electric vehicles and click on that, and that will get you the fact sheets. And that has in the bottom right of each fact sheets the power factor of the onboard chargers.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Thank you, Jim. Do we have any other questions—phone questions or online questions?

COORDINATOR: The next question is from David Bruffy.

DAVID BRUFFY: Hi. I'm from Mountain Line Transit Authority. We're in Morgantown, West Virginia. We just received a TIGER grant that was going to let us put in a solar power plant. As a part of that, we're probably going to put in CC charging for electric buses.

But what I would like to know is what the cost of installing a Level 2 public station in a nearby park and ride.

This would be something that would have a short run to it. What are we looking at in terms of cost to be able to make that service available to the public?

JIM FRANCFORT: You know, that really—this is Jim—that really goes back to, you know, how much concrete are you going to cut?

What we've looked in the past the minimal, you know, no concrete cutting, you're, oh, somewhere in, you know, maybe $4,000, $5,000.

But, you know, having said that, I just saw an article that Coulomb had put in some Level 2s at a—I believe a company—and they were $11,000 apiece, say $33,000 for three.

And I'm not suggesting that's just hardware differences by any means. It's not. It's also complexity of installation.

DAVID BRUFFY: That's a good ballpark though. That's about the...

JIM FRANCFORT: Yes.

DAVID BRUFFY: ...cost of two bus shelters. So that works.

JIM FRANCFORT: Yes, yes it's really, you know, how much concrete you're cutting, what are the safeties, the public access? Are you putting in a, you know, something you can read a credit card—how much interactive? You want it to have a meter onboard; you want to have smart chargers got communications?

You know, I would think that the bottom line for a piece of equipment if you bought en masse—probably around $500, maybe $500 at the lowest.

And I think, you know, the sky's the limit, but I think you could get a smart one for $1,500 to maybe $2,000 for the hardware. So then you get into the complexity issues of installing it.

DAVID BRUFFY: Okay, very good. Thank you.

COORDINATOR: The next question is from Phil Barker.

PHIL BARKER: Yes, I was wondering on rapid charge facilities in public areas—I understand that they've had those in Japan, and they're not used very much. And I wonder what the thinking is on providing rapid charge in public areas?

JIM FRANCFORT: You know, it's kind of like the—it's a two-sided answer. You want public charging infrastructure so people have greater confidence that they can get a charge if they need one when they're out running around or if they're going from city to city.

The inverse of that is you want everyone to charge at night when there's off-peak demand. You know, and we're seeing most utilities that are active in this issue are coming up with off-peak charging. And you want greater utilization of the plants off-peak.

So it's almost like you want the infrastructure out there in the public, but you never want anyone to use it, which makes it a tough revenue model to say the least.

You know, and I don't know what the exact numbers from the study that—I'm not sure what that study is. You know, it may be a factor of how many vehicles are out there too, and what are they charging?

Are they charging, you know, $0.50 a kilowatt hour or higher in the public domain, and it's $0.10 at home?

What we saw in the past—we had 100 vehicles that were think cities that were used outside of a New York, northern New York train stations.

As part of the lease payment, you got preferential parking and free charging. No one charged at home. Everyone charged during the day because there was no additional cost.

And so part of the Department of Energy's EV Project and other funded projects for the Department of Transportation—you know, transportation implication funded projects—is questions like that: what will that revenue be?

We'll be getting data from I think it's 19,000 level to EVSE and fast chargers and hopefully will be able to answer some of those questions based on charging patterns.

PHIL BARKER: Thank you.

JIM FRANCFORT: You're welcome.

COORDINATOR: The next question is from Paul Heitmann.

PAUL HEITMANN: Hi. This is Paul Heitmann with ECOtality. I have a question for Roland from KCP&L. Part of our deployment, you know, involves working with utilities. I actually am the person that works with utilities for ECOtality.

And one of the things we're finding is commercial hosts that when they look at the numbers and do the calculations you mentioned, you know, these are hosts that are spending $15,000 to $20,000 a month in energy.

Some of the smaller ones are ideal places to put these. But when you look at the numbers for the demand charge, it's a very kind of a chilling effect on that, and it's a pretty hard sell to overcome, especially before they're really used a lot.

Did you run into any of that? Did you even have that constraint, or how did you handle the demand charge for peak demand?

ROLAND MALIWAT: We really didn't because of the customers that we picked. And I think we looked at that initially on when we get down in the smaller players, for instance, that they were going to have other issues like that. And so that kind of kept us up at what we call our tier-one customer base, so that basically—energy came out of the question for them.

And in all honesty with getting one charging station in any location, that really wasn't too much of a concern. So I mean, I believe that to be an issue as we go forward, but at this point, it just wasn't anything that we had to address because of the groups that we chose.

PAUL HEITMANN: Okay, well thank you very much.

COORDINATOR: The next question is from Bob Spantz. Your line is open.

BOB SPANTZ: Yes, Bob Spantz)with Get Plugging. Had a question pertaining to UL approval. As we know, there are several other companies out there that approve electric vehicle—electric charging units.

But I've talked to some electrical contractors, and they have concerns with authorization from the local municipalities. Has this been a problem?

JIM FRANCFORT: I'm sorry, I don't quite understand the question actually.

BOB SPANTZ: Okay as we, the UL approval is basically the key approval for our electric car charging units and any electrical appliance.

But there are other companies out there that are authorized as electric approval companies. They go through the testing and they approve them.

JIM FRANCFORT: Sure, other national...

BOB SPANTZ: Some electrical contractors—they say, unless it's actually "UL approved," that there's going to be concerns on the villages that it is actually approved?

JIM FRANCFORT: My understanding is any of the laboratories that do their approval should be sufficient. It may be an education problem locally.

BOB SPANTZ: Okay, has anyone run across any of those problems yet?

JIM FRANCFORT: I—we've not that I'm aware of. But, you know, for better or worse, you know, UL's the most—the most easily recognizable one.

BOB SPANTZ: Right, right.

JIM FRANCFORT: It just might be an education requirement.

BOB SPANTZ: Okay, thank you.

COORDINATOR: Next question is from Joel Starling.

JOE STARLING: Yes, hello this is Joel Starling, Blackbird Group, Austin, Texas. Actually found out about this Webinar from Chris Ashcraft, the Alamo Cities Area Clean Cities coalition down in San Antonio. And I appreciate the opportunity to hear what you all have to say.

Unfortunately, missed the first 25 minutes due to some live meeting technical issues. Is there a— is this entire Webinar recorded and/or the charts available online?

SANDRA LOI: Yes, this is Sandra from NREL supporting Clean Cities. The Webinar is being recorded and will be posted on the Clean Cities Web site and in the Webinar archives.

And I know you said you've worked with Chris, so he could probably direct you there, or you can contact myself, and we will be posting the slides as well.

JOE STARLING: Okay, that's great. Thank you.

SANDRA LOI: Sure.

COORDINATOR: The next question is from Matt Carver.

MATT CARVER: Yes, I'm with Maricopa County in Phoenix, Arizona, area. Of course, we are one of the states that's going to be having some of these electric vehicles show up here—hopefully here soon.

I was just wondering if there—if anybody's heard of a local municipal-level government that has successfully set up their own charging stations for their own fleet type of vehicles or at least put some in for public use on publicly accessible municipal locations like, you know, courthouses—that type of thing?

We're looking at doing this in a variety of locations, and it's we just—we're not really sure how—what exactly we're going to end up getting into here so...

ROLAND MALIWAT: I would say yes. In Kansas City, one of our site partners is one of our largest cities that's on the outskirts of our territory. So there, as a municipality, we're going to put it in one of their parking facilities.

But we recently had another municipality on their own outside of the Clean Cities project and, et cetera, put—I mean, outside of our Clean Cities project, I should say—install a charging station as part of some of their sustainability commitment.

So in the area we're going to see a few of the local municipalities installing them and also trying to incorporate them into some of their—you know, incorporate the idea of establishing fleets around EVs.

MATT CARVER: Okay, do you know if there'd be some way we can get in touch with an organization like that and kind of maybe benefit from their experience and ask them...

ROLAND MALIWAT: Yes, I think you could probably contact our local—the Kansas City Clean Cities coalition and get that information from them. Their contact is Kelly Gilbert.

MATT CARVER: Okay, sounds good. Also, kind of a more detailed technical note: we're concerned here—I don't know what other states have experience with it—but with the economy, we've had significant instances of copper theft. And we're concerned about these—the cords, these charging cables, which connect to the vehicle.

Has anybody come up with an idea for securing those? Because if they're not, you know, if they're not energized unless they're connected to the car, then it's, you know, I mean these things can be, you know, cut off and removed and just for the copper content.

So is—has anybody thought of security for the, you know, charging units themselves or...

JIM FRANCFORT: You know, I'll just address—I know the EV Project with the 15,000 chargers, or EVSE rather, they're putting the orange cable signage that says do not recycle.

MATT CARVER: Okay.

JIM FRANCFORT: Yes, you know, I mean you're depending on the recycler being, you know...

MATT CARVER: Yes, okay. All right, well thank you—appreciate it.

COORDINATOR: The next question is from Julie Cairns.

JULIE CAIRNS: Hi. This is Julie Cairns, and I'm with CSA Standard. And so tagging onto the question, I was going to ask a similar question because everything was referencing UL listed. But, you know, CSA also does the certification. So I was curious as to whether there was a requirement for UL listing, and that was clarified.

So thank you to the previous questioner. But the other thing I wanted to just comment on was, and I'm not sure, I also was late in getting logged on, but one of the—in the previous presentation, they had talked about interest in looking at a station standards to try to streamline the process for installation.

And I just wanted to make that person aware that CSA has a similar standard for hydrogen stations. And I think it would probably be applicable to this as well.

So I'll look up to see who that was so that I can contact them. But that was all I wanted to comment. Thank you.

COORDINATOR: The next question is from Ronald Flowers. Your line is open.

RON FLOWERS: Yes, Ron Flowers from Clean Cities coalition in Washington, D.C. This is to Roland. What strategy did you use in selecting your partners for your electric project?

ROLAND MALIWAT: We actually did a site selection criteria where we had a number of items. Basically, we got together as an internal team and said what would make a good site partner. And that included everything from, number one, the size of the customer, how much energy they spent with us on an annual basis, down to—I'm looking at the things we call them this year.

We had customer value. We wanted to look at the class of the customer, how involved they wanted to be with us on this project, and whether they were willing to look at customer subsidy of electricity.

We had another category called Community Engagement Value, which talked about growth opportunity. So would we be able to grow this location should this project take off?

Obviously, we had community political and regulatory value. What did that mean to our big stakeholders that way?

Another one was attractiveness of site. And then we took a look at the technical considerations, which were site connectivity to the source and site safety.

So as they kind of encompassed a lot of different areas that we thought were important. And we basically selected about 25 customers and then ranked them based on all this criteria. And the top 10 boiled to the top, and from there, we started approaching them with the idea.

RON FLOWERS: Thank you.

REBECCA HARSH: Linda, I'm sorry, this is Becky Harsh. I'm sorry to say that I have to jump off the call. I have another call in about five minutes. And I just wanted to let everybody know that if you do have any questions from any of the materials that EEI presented today, please let me know.

I'll give—I'll send to Linda all my contact information, and she can forward it to you all. And if you want to get in touch with me for any reason, please do so. And I just wanted to say thank you again for allowing us to be a part of the discussion today.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Becky, thank you for your presentation, and I'm sure that our Clean Cities coalitions will want to be in touch with a number of your members.

REBECCA HARSH: And we would welcome that very much. So I'll make sure I get you all my contact information. And again, please feel free to contact me, and we'll go from there.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Thank you. I'd just like to open it up for our Clean Cities partners ahead of the others right now.

Are there any Clean Cities coordinators or coalition stakeholders on the phone that have questions?

COORDINATOR: If there are any questions at this time, please press star then one.

SANDRA LOI: Linda, I have a few more online if you want to take them now.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay, if we don't have any phone calls, then let's...

SANDRA LOI: Okay.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: ...do it online.

SANDRA LOI: Alexi, do you have any calls coming in?

COORDINATOR: We do have one on the phone...

SANDRA LOI: Okay.

COORDINATOR: ...from Marnie Hunter.

MARNIE HUNTER: Hi. I just wanted to make a quick comment actually. I believe someone was asking about copper wire before. And I'm forgetting at the moment which jurisdiction coordinated this, but I believe they were working with the police department at scrap metal facilities and bringing in examples of the wires that were going to be used just so they knew what it would look like and explain that if they are accepting this stuff, there might be potential to, you know, repercussions so that they might be fined or whatever it is.

So I know that there was a partnership with the police department to contact scrap metal for the copper wire. So that's it.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Thanks for your comment.

ROLAND MALIWAT: Linda, hi this is Roland also. Unfortunately, I've got to go also. I have another meeting commitment that I have to make. So I would like to thank you guys again for letting me speak.

And if you have any questions, obviously you can get information through Linda to me or through the Kansas City Clean City coalition. They have a direct line to me, and we can talk at any time. Thank you very much.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay, I guess thank you very much Roland as well, and I'm sure that we'll be in touch. Thank you.

ROLAND MALIWAT: Thank you. Bye.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: I guess unless there's questions for Jim who's still left, I'd like to give about one or two more questions and then close out.

COORDINATOR: We do have a question from Dave DuVal.

DAVE DUVAL: Yes, this is Dave DuVal again from Fairfax County. One of the issues that seems to be prominent in all the Webinars and discussions that I've seen has been obstacles and permitting and inspections.

Our permits and inspections people here seem to think that it's basically a nonissue. They see no problems with issuing permits the way they have always issued them.

In fact, they say they may have issued permits for EVSE without evening knowing that because they don't require the applicant to say what is going on the other side of the circuit.

And what I wanted to ask is what kind of obstacles have other jurisdictions run into that we might be overlooking?

JIM FRANCFORT: You know, it's more the time it takes because if you, you know, you can plan on buying a refrigerator. With an EV, you know, sometimes it's near spontaneous.

You have to have the fueling ability when you bring it home. And I think the range is from no problems in some municipalities because it happens quickly when it goes online. You can do a self inspection. To the other extreme is one of the cities that the EV Project's being deployed in wanted to raise their permitting fee from $40 to $400 when they heard electric vehicles were coming.

And then after they were told that they were no longer going to be one of the deployment cities, the problem went away.

And so, you know, there's a wide, just 44,000, you know, permitting authorities out there. And there's going to be potentially 44,000 different scenarios.

So a lot of them—I know up in Washington State some of the municipalities have had for years the ability to do online permitting. You know, you get in there—10 minutes later, you've got a permit.

DAVE DUVAL: Yes, that's basically what they say they do here.

JIM FRANCFORT: Yes, it just depends, you know. And it's such a variety of, you know, how different local governments have installed the—you know, it's the inspection process that can be a problem because they require the inspector to come out before and then after.

They just require them to come out after—can you do some self inspection? Again it, you know, it's a variety of scenarios.

DAVE DUVAL: Okay, so we may—we probably are okay then if...

JIM FRANCFORT: Yes, I mean, do they require the inspector to come out first?

DAVE DUVAL: No.

JIM FRANCFORT: Do they have to go out afterwards?

DAVE DUVAL: That I don't know.

JIM FRANCFORT: Yes, you know, and it gets into some—if you have to come out first to meet the electrician, then the electrician comes back and installs it. Then the inspector comes back again, and then the electrician has to come back again. It just gets to a cost too, you know, and that becomes a hurdle also.

So I think there's quite a variety of scenarios of how this is playing out.

DAVE DUVAL: Okay, thank you.

JIM FRANCFORT: I'd just say the ultimate goal would be to have the electrician self-inspect, and maybe the authority comes out and maybe inspects every tenth installation—something like that.

COORDINATOR: And there are no further...

LINDA BLUESTEIN: I think we'll take one or two more questions. Sandra, do you have anything in writing for Jim?

SANDRA LOI: I do. I have—it's sort of a two-part. One was—oh, I just lost the question. But one was a question on whether signage for EVs is going to be standardized?

JIM FRANCFORT: I got you.

SANDRA LOI: And another...

JIM FRANCFORT: I've been answering these as we...

SANDRA LOI: Oh.

JIM FRANCFORT: Yes, I'm on—I'm answering online so, yes.

SANDRA LOI: Okay.

JIM FRANCFORT: Multitasking.

SANDRA LOI: Did you want to go ahead and let the current audience—give them a little bit of background on that?

JIM FRANCFORT: I'm sorry. Oh, I've been replying to all. So whoever's on...

SANDRA LOI: Oh, okay. Are there any more on the phone line, Alexi?

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Jim, we're going to have to pay you time and a half I think.

COORDINATOR: No there are no further questions on the phone.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: Okay. Okay, well I think we should probably wrap up, Sandra.

SANDRA LOI: Okay.

LINDA BLUESTEIN: So thank you very much, everyone, for attending this Webinar. As we mentioned before, the contents of the Webinar, including slides supporting, will be online in the Clean Cities Web site under the toolbox.

We look forward to the next Webinar. We'll get in touch with everyone beforehand and give you the agenda and the information on the speakers.

And if you have any questions following this Webinar, I think most of the speakers have left their information for follow-up in terms of their e-mail addresses. But if there are any questions, you can get in touch with myself or Sandra Loi at NREL, and we'll make sure the questions get to the right places.

Thank you very much, and we look forward to working with you in the future and also on your participation in the upcoming Webinars. Thanks. Bye.

COORDINATOR: This concludes today's call. You may disconnect at this time.