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U.S. Department of Energy Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Survey Training Webinar (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for the Survey Training webinar presented on December 13, 2010, by Caley Johnson and Nick Muerdter, National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

COORDINATOR: Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode until the question-and-answer period. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star then one.

Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Now, I'd like to turn over the meeting to Sandra Loi. You may begin.

SANDRA LOI: Thank you. Good morning, everyone, good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for our survey training Webinar. You know, we've done these in the past, and we don't have as many changes this year.

We haven't completely revamped it again on you, but we do have some, you know, small tweaks and updates, and we want to just go ahead and them give an opportunity, especially for newer coordinators, to kind of see what it's like to go into their survey and how to input the information.

With me this morning, I have Nick Muerdter, who is an applications engineer here at NREL, and I'm sure a lot of you know who he is. He's going to talk you through live. That's what you're seeing up on your screen right now.

We also have Caley Johnson, our analyst, and he also is here and will be available—they will both be available—for questions once Nick walks you through how the survey works. So we're going to go ahead and let Nick walk you through what the survey looks like, and then we'll open up the lines at the end for some questions. So Nick?

NICK MUERDTER: Thank you. So as Sandra mentioned, we don't have as extensive of changes this year, but we did, you know, make what we think will be a lot of tweaks to help you and just make the whole process easier and gather some information we weren't doing as well before.

So we'll start out by just how to get into the survey. You'll go to your coordinator toolbox area, and then it's down on the lower left-hand side. You've got "Clean Cities Annual Reporting," and then you can go to this: "Log in to the Annual Reporting Database."

And when you click there, you'll get this login screen, and it's just a matter of logging in. If you don't have your password, you can go through this reset process, which should e-mail you your password reset instructions, so, you know, if you have any problems, just follow that, and you should be able to get an account set up if you don't already have it or know your password.

I should also mention that what I'm showing you today are all of these latest changes we've made, but these changes won't be live until probably the end of this week or next week sometime; been in a little time crunch, but we're trying to get everything done.

So what I'm showing you isn't live as you go just fill out the survey today, but hopefully very shortly—within a week or two—everything you see will be live. So anyway, now I will log into the new survey, and this is pretty much the same as last year, but the idea is you'll see if the 2010 survey, which is for all activities from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010.

So this is the survey you'll be filling out. January 1 of the following year—of this upcoming year, I should say—there'll be another option to start filling out the 2011 survey, and you don't want to fill that out—the 2010—is the one that will be due in March or April or...

CALEY JOHNSON: March.

NICK MUERDTER: ...March. The 2011 survey will just be available if you want to start inputting outreach activities as this 2010 survey is available right now in case you want to go ahead and start inputting things, and it's open the entire year.

And then in addition, your previous surveys are available here as PDFs, and then last year's, we introduced Excel reports, so that's also available to the 2009 survey.

But basically, you'll just click on the first big item here for the 2010 survey to hop in, and then you'll get this screen, which if you filled out the surveys before, this is all mostly the same.

So there's just a little bit of an introduction here, training, how you get started, so, but basically, it's just a matter of all these sections on the left-hand side need to be filled out.

A good place to start with is operative information, so we'll hop into that section, and here are just some basic questions, which should hopefully be pretty easy to fill out. And most of the surveys follow the same sort of standards, you know. There's fields for you to fill out, asterisks mark—these orange asterisks—mark any fields that are required.

And then we also have these question marks, which are for additional help, so if you click on those, you can get, you know, some additional explanation if anything seems to be unclear, and hopefully it'll be in that little question mark link.

But I basically go through here—how many hours per weeks did this coordinator spend on Clean Cities work? I'll put 20 hours. How many years have I been a coordinator? I'll say five years.

Total dues collected: I'll say $2,000. How much funding was obtained? I will say $5,000. And then here—some just basic stakeholder information. Number of current stakeholders: I have 100; private: 50.

Just some additional questions: Does the State Energy Office provide financial administration? I'll say no. How would you rate the quality? I will say excellent because I care about my data and the quality of the survey.

And how would I obtain most of the data for the survey? So, you know, maybe I estimated some of the data that I'm inputting here, but hopefully, you know, I surveyed some of my stakeholders by phone or by paper so I have good hard data. And then just the basic question: Have I registered with Grants.gov? And I'll say, "Yes."

And so after you fill out each one of these sections, it's just a matter of hitting save, and after it finishes saving, tells you it successfully updated, and then everything is saved. And so it's just a matter of really going between these various sections on the left-hand side, so that was just a basic one for just some basic operating information.

We'll go to "Coalition Information," which is very blank for this test coalition, but basically this just lists basic details for the coordinators of your coalition and your coalition details like your Web site and all of that. You can actually update these details through the survey itself.

This is just more here so on an annual basis you can sort of look at all the details, look at who's listed as coordinators, make sure all that is right, and if anything's wrong, follow these instructions up here to e-mail Carol, and she can fix anything that seems off.

So next, we'll go to "Outreach Activities." So if I'm—for all the outreach activities I do during the 2010 year, I'll add them here as activities, and you can see I already have one activity added, but I would just hit this "Add Activity" to add a new one, and then I get the form for entering that activity.

And so it's just here a matter of filling out the form, and so I would give the activity name, select some dates, and you can also add additional dates. So if it, you know, occurs several times throughout the year, you can—you only have to input the activity once, and you can just have multiple days associated with a single activity.

There is—you select any technologies that were related to that activity. For activity types, we've added a couple of new ones in here below "Advancing the Choice" and "Advertisement." We added "Conference," and then we separated out meetings so you can specify if it's a meeting with stakeholders or just any other type of meeting.

So hopefully that will allow you to better distinguish your activities that you have throughout the year. So let's say this is a conference. Then we have this question: Percentage contribution from coalition. And this caused a number of questions last year as to what that really means.

I think we tried to explain it in this little tooltip, but I don't know if we succeeded entirely last year, but basically we're just trying to ask you to judge how responsible you are—you feel you are—for this activity. How much did your coalition contribute to this overall activity?

You know, were you a marginal player in putting together this activity, or did you do it all yourself? So it's just a rating of 0 to 100% as to how responsible your coalition feels.

But one thing we did new this year is anytime you see this "percentage contribution from coalition" question, there's this little text below that says. "Not sure? Use the percentage contribution calculator to help determine this percentage."

And if you click on this link, a new little tool pops up, and we're hoping this will clear up a lot of the questions to sort of give you a sense of what we're looking for in the percentage thing by asking you a few additional questions. So first, we have to—is the project partner a stakeholder of your coalition?

So this is maybe more appropriate with, you know, working with alternative fuel vehicles and working with specific fleets, but we're sort of asking, "Is that stakeholder—is that fleet a stakeholder of your coalition?"

If I say, "Yes," then I go to the next question: "Is this project partner a federal fleet, state fleet, an alternative fuel provider, or natural gas utilities?" I'll say, "No." How influential was the coalition? And I'll say we were significantly, and then you see down here your percentage contribution is 100%.

And if you play around with these, you'll see how we are able to calculate some basic numbers depending on how you answer these three separate questions. You know, if I answer they're not a stakeholder and they're not a state or federal fleet and I only modestly, we're going to estimate that you're only 10% responsible.

So if you click "Save," whatever answer came out of that little tool you populated there, and, you know, hopefully that little tool will, you know, you'll use it a few times, sort of get a sense of what we're looking for, and then it will be easier to answer that question. But you can always go through the three simple questions, and hopefully that'll make things easier.

So with this, back to these outreach activities, we ask for total persons reached. Let's say I think I reached 200 people and the audience—this means the airport and transit, let's say—and any additional notes you feel like noting, you'd put them down here, and, you know, anything else you think is pertinent for us to know—feel free to add them there.

It's just sort of whatever you want to add there, so I'd hit "Save," and this Webinar activity got added with those dates, and it's now saved to the survey, and if I want to edit any of these, I can always go back and edit, or I can hit "Delete."

You'll be asked if you're sure you want to delete stuff, but if I went back to edit, you know, I could realize that I need to add additional dates later on or change, you know, percentage contribution—any of those things I can edit and then save.

The other thing we have in outreach activities is a way to import previous years' activities, so if I go to add activity again, you know—say I have the same basic activity every year, and it's more into filling those forms out with the same stuff over and over again every year.

I can go to "Import Activity," and this will show you all your activities from all previous years. So let's say once again we're holding Caley's Climate Cabaret because that was a fun event. So I'll import that, and what it does is it imports all the details from that previous year's event, but all you have to do is add in the dates that it was held during the 2010 year.

So you know, it was held on the 21st of January, and I'll add another date, the 30th, and so everything else that we've associated with Caley's Climate Cabaret last year was imported, and then I just had to add those dates, and I hit "Save," and then this event becomes part of my 2010 events.

So next up is "Grants," and you'll see from here on out most of these follow that same pattern of, you know—we have a list of things, you know, whether it's fleets or activities or projects we've been involved in, and it's just a matter of really hitting the "Add" to add a new one of those and editing existing ones, and they all get listed in a similar fashion.

So for "Grants" I'll hit "Add Grants," and this is another place we spent a little time revamping because we realized there was some confusion and just some data-collection problems at our end with how we were accounting for grants that spanned multiple years.

So the first part of the grant is just who the grantor was, so my grant came from Caley because he gets me lots of money. The first question is—we're asking for the total grant amount, and so that's the total grant amount over all years. So even if it's a multi-year grant, we're asking for the entire amount of the grant.

So let's say I had a $1 million grant—well, one more zero—and I got $500,000 in matching funds. So you'll see down here we're doing a little math just to sort of make you realize what we're asking for, and so the total grant in that was $1 million; total matching funds was $500,000.

That means the total project funding for this grant was really $1.5 million, and then for multi-year grants what we're asking for is the length of the grant. You know, if the grant was only in 2010, then you simply answer that one. If it was spread over five years, though, you'd enter five years.

So maybe it started in 2010, and it will go until 2015. So the next question is the year the grant began, so, you know, we're asking you to input any active grants you have at this point where hopefully next year with this data, we'll be able to make this easier. So right now, we need this baseline of when all of your grants began—the duration of the grants and their total amount.

And this will allow us to account for multi-year grants and just grants in general a lot more accurately, so we ask for when the grant began, so let's say this one actually started in 2008. So it started in 2008—it's going to run for five years—so that'll mean it'll end in 2013.

Then the next thing we're asking you for is how much you actually spent in 2010, so these up here are your total amounts for your grants and matching funds, but down here, we're asking you how much was spent in 2010.

And based on the length of the grant, we're providing you with some default values that simply divide the total amount by however many years and, you know, if it's evenly distributed, then these are fine.

I'm assuming that you actually spent $200,000 in 2010 since there's $1 million over five years and that your matching funds that you spent in 2010 were $100,000 because it was $500,000 in matching funds spread over five years.

But you know, if I actually am keeping track of this and I know I only spent $180,000 in 2010, then this will really help us keep track and know how much money was spent in grants in any given year.

So these are the main changes over that will hopefully I think clear up confusion over how multi-year grants are handled and then on our end also allow us to better analyze all the numbers we're getting.

So hopefully that'll make some sense, but yeah, so and down here are just these live calculations of the total amounts, just adding-up, you know, how much was actually spent in 2010 combining matching funds and grant amounts.

Next, we're just asking for the sources of the grants, you know, whether it's the State Energy Office, the Department of Energy, and then we added a new one this year whether this grant was related to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

So you simply select, you know, this was a DOE grant, and it was also related to the Recovery Act, and I would just mark those as being sources of the grant. Any partners involved, you just add their names here, so Sandra was a partner in this one, and then you can add multiple partners, remove partners—so yeah, any partners involved, add them there.

Technologies, just mark off anything that's grant involved and then briefly just describe the purpose of the grant. So maybe this was to install Unity 5 pumps or, I don't know, something, and then any other grant details—again, just add them down here in this sort of notes area.

So I'd hit "Save" there. Oh. This is not live yet, but anyway, theoretically, when this goes live at the end of this week or next week, you will never see those kind of errors. But the basics of it is we've added some fields up here to do some calculations.

So up next is "New Fuel Stations." So here nothing has changed from last year. We're just asking for the number of new stations only, so that's only stations in 2010 that your coalition helped install, and we break it down between public and private. And so let's say my coalition helped install two public Unity 5 stations and, you know, we helped one fleet install an electric station.

Then I would just mark those numbers of those new stations during 2010, hit "Save," and whoa. Things are not happening. Oh, I know why. Anyway, yeah, that will not be an issue come next week, but anyway, theoretically, I'd hit "Save" there. Hopefully we won't run into too many more of these in our little demo today.

So you know, once I'm just sort of going through these. Up next is "Alternative Fuel in Vehicles." This is another place where we made some tweaks. We've gotten completely rid of the fuel blend sections, so before, if you remember, there were, you know, B100 would go in this AFV section, and then, you know, other blends, lower blend levels, would go in the fuel blend section.

But it got to be a little confusing, and yeah, it was just sort of confusing having that distinction of biodiesel blend less than a certain amount in two different areas and then over a certain amount in another area.

So we've combined all of that into the "Alternative Fuel and Vehicles" section, so this will account for both fuel sold and including those lower-level biodiesel blends as well as alternative-fueled vehicles that are using B100 and all the existing stuff there.

So here, I would go to "Add Inventory" to add a new project or fleet, and so up first is the Fleet Aim or Project Aim. These "Fleet Aim" or "Project Aim" fields are just really descriptive names you give specific projects that you want to separate in the list of things, so really it's just a way for you to keep track of stuff.

So let's say I was on John's fleet, and this is going to represent my E85—John's fleet E85 vehicles, and let's say I know how much alternative fuel is actually used by these vehicles.

The only option is I only know the percentage of time alternative fuel was used in these vehicles. You know, we also prefer if you know the actual fuel usage but, you know, if you only know the percent of time, we can come up with some numbers to help estimate things.

So if I know the amount—how much alternative fuel was actually used by these vehicles—I'll say 60,000 gallons was used. They were used in light-duty vehicles, you know. I've left my E85 ethanol here.

We ask, "What market do they serve?" Say this is mostly local government; then we ask, "How many miles traveled per vehicle per year?" And this is where Caley has also tried to come up with some better defaults, so this is by default—11,432 miles is what we assume for a light-duty, but if you play around with this, you'll see for a few other things, we have better defaults.

So for police vehicles, you'll see that automatically switches to 15,000. So, you know, Caley's done some work to define some better defaults for a few of these out there. So if, you know, we always prefer if you actually know the number of vehicles, the miles that each vehicle traveled per year, but if you don't, hopefully our better defaults will help you out in that area.

So let's say I don't know, but 11,400 sounds reasonable. I'll take that default. Now it's asking for number of vehicles. This is another new little feature we added. This is only for E85, so down here, we say, "Don't know? Use E85 to FFVs back-calculator."

So this is mainly the situation where you know the amount of fuel used but you don't know the number of flex-fuel vehicles that were actually reached by selling that amount of fuel.

You know, this can be the case if you were dealing with a fuel seller and not necessarily a fleet. So if I want to use this, I just click this, and it's pretty basic. So based on what I've input up here of that, you know, we were using 60,000 gallons.

I'll say the percent of—now I have to estimate—the percent of time that the FFVs used E85. So let's say I estimate they used E85 80% of the time. Based on Caley's magic calculations, we're going to estimate for you that there were 97 vehicles involved in this if, you know, it used 60,000 gallons, and based on some default assumptions, we'll say 97.

So I hit "Save." We'll save them in there. Again, if you actually know the number of vehicles involved, definitely put that there, but if you don't, hopefully that little tool this year will help make that calculation a little easier.

Again, if you use this percentage contribution from coalition—if I didn't know again, I would click here after these few questions. Are they stakeholder? Yes. Are they a state fleet? Yes, and I was modest in impacting them, so this is going to estimate for me 65%, so I'll take that. That sounds reasonable.

They add any notes; hit "Save." So up next, I'll show you how the biodiesel stuff also was integrated into this whole section, so if I "Add Inventory" again, and so I'm adding just this generic biodiesel fleet.

I know how much alternative fuel is being used. I'll say 5,000 gallons of biodiesel was used. They're using light-duty vehicles. Fuel was biodiesel. When you select biodiesel, now this new thing comes up for blend level, so we're asking you to input blend level here.

So let's say I know it was B20. If it's B20, you'll notice that number of vehicles and miles traveled per vehicle per year are no longer required fields because we're saying basically for low-level biodiesel blends, we realize you might not have these per-vehicle details, so we're not going to require those.

But if I input B50, we are going to require that. Threshold is B25; so B25 doesn't, but B26 does. So our assumption—there is anything above B25 is being used in alternative-fuel vehicles, and hopefully then you have better numbers, but let's say this was B50.

What market do they serve? Generally, how many miles? Let's say I do know this, and they only traveled 8,000 miles a year, and number of vehicles was 5,000—or oh, that's a lot of vehicles—so 500 and let's say I'm pretty confident our coalition was 90% sure. Our contribution was 90%.

I'd hit "Save," and the biodiesel fleet gets added there so if the alternative-fuel vehicle isn't much different from last year, but we added that stuff to integrate all the biodiesel into one place.

So hopefully all the biodiesel stuff should be easier to find as well as the little E85—that calculator—if, you know, you only know the amount of E85 fuel that was sold but you don't know the number of vehicles. Hopefully that'll help you answer those questions.

And again to reiterate, hybrids are tallied in the fuel economy improvement section, so it's definitely easy to think of hybrids as belonging in this AFV section, but really we're still looking for them in the fuel economy improvement section because, you know, for the most part, they're still gasoline vehicles that are just highly efficient.

So up next is "Off-Road Vehicles," and here I would just add in inventory of off-road vehicles. So that could be any number of these things: construction equipment, farm equipment, forklifts, mining equipment, planes, railroads, ships, you know, so any of this more exotic stuff, add it here.

So let's say I did some stuff with some ships that were using biodiesel, and they used 50,000 gallons of biodiesel and number of vehicles. Let's say this involved four ships, and for percentage contribution, I have 100% responsible because they were a stakeholder, and I will hit "Save."

So that was adding off-road. Nothing new there from last year. "Fuel Economy Improvement" section is up next. It seems a little slow. Okay, fuel economy improvements, so again, this is where you would add hybrid vehicles but also just anything you've done like adding low-resistance tires to a fleet—anything basically to improve the fuel economy of a fleet of vehicles.

So here nothing has changed from last year—asking for fleet name, start date, when this project started—so let's say this was my own personal fleet, and it started on January 28, 2010, and let's say I installed some low-resistance tires on my vehicles, so these were light-duty vehicles.

We asked for the previous fuel, so I was using gasoline. My previous fuel economy used to be before installing these low-resistance tires was 24; okay, 24. My current fuel: it's still gasoline because, you know, my tires didn't change the gasoline my car is using, and let's say I got up to 26 miles per gallon.

Let's say I have a fleet of actually 2,000 vehicles. I have a big garage at home and miles traveled per vehicle per year. Let's say I travel 8,000 miles, and then percentage contribution, I am 100% responsible. Hit "Save," and there we go.

My fleet has been added, and then I guess I forgot to mention this, but as you add new things, you'll see the GGEs reduced for each project then. The GGE is reduced, so by doing that, I reduced my gasoline gallons equivalent by 51,000 gallons.

So up next would be "Vehicle Miles Traveled Reduction," so that includes ridesharing, public transportation. I would add a new project here. I would add a fleet name, start date, method. Not much here is new.

We did add Telecommute as a new method, so, you know, if you were actually taking vehicles off the road completely by, you know, encouraging people to telecommute, that's a new option.

And then filling out vehicle class, fuel type, fuel economy of the vehicles, the number of vehicles and how many miles were reduced per vehicle, you know, so if by telecommuting I was traveling 1,000 less miles per year, I would input 1,000 there.

Percentage contribution from coalition, and I would hit "Save." I'm going to try to just go through these last ones. There weren't many changes from last year, so we have plenty of time for questions. I'll just sort of briefly go through these last few.

"Truck Stop Electrification"—so if you helped install any truck stop electrification sites during the 2010 year, you would add it here. Stick in the project name when you started with this project even if it's, you know, past years, you know—say this project started in 2008: you'd enter that date here.

How many number of bays that the truck stop electrification site has and then how many hours each bay is used per year. And again, we have some default values here for you, but if you know how many hours they're actually being used per year, we would encourage you to input them there.

"Percentage Contribution"—again, we have our little percentage contribution calculator. So on-board idle reduction, same thing as last year again, but if you're doing anything with on-board idle reduction, such as installing auxiliary power units, direct heat with thermal storage cooling, direct fire heater or thermal storage.

Anyway, so if you installed any of these—helped install—any of this equipment into a fleet during the year, you would simply select that number of vehicles in the projects. And then we ask some questions: average hours the equipment is used per vehicle per year and then average of gallons of fuel saved per vehicle per hour.

And again, we have some defaults, but if you actually know these values, that would be great to input them. And finally, we get to "Other Idle Reduction" and again, the same thing, so that's just any other type of idle reduction projects that don't fall into truck stop electrification and on-board.

So if it's policies or programs, you input them here and again same basic questions of what type of vehicles and, you know, how much this idle reduction is used during the year.

So assuming you go through all this, I mean, you know, if you didn't do any of these, if your coalition didn't specifically participate in, you know, say, doing any on-board idle reduction, you don't have to do the next section.

But, you know, I would encourage you to visit every section, check it out, make sure your fleet didn't do any of that, and you basically then fill out each section, and hopefully it isn't too painful to do.

But then afterwards you would go to the "Server Report" section, and you could actually do this at any time while you're filling out the survey. But we have two days to view a report as either a PDF document or an Excel document.

And these haven't changed essentially from last year, but the PDF report looks something like this. You have a nice little pie chart as your gallons of gasoline equivalent reduced as well as greenhouse gas emissions reduced.

And it sort of breaks it into each section that you have, so, you know, apparently I did a lot with truck stop electrification in this example, so that accounted for 49% of my six million gallons of GGEs reduced.

And out of my nearly 50,000 tons of greenhouse gases I reduced, 53% was truck stop electrification, and in this report, there is then all the details of everything you entered in your survey in a nice printable PDF report that hopefully will be of some use to you.

And then we also offer this Excel spreadsheet, which offers all the same stuff, so if you want to make your own charts and graphs, you can certainly do that by downloading this, and then in here are all the details separated into tabs along with the GGEs reduced of each project and greenhouse gases reduced.

So if you're looking more for the raw data, that's in the Excel spreadsheet, and you can do with that whatever you want, so assuming you look at your report and everything looks good and, you know, it's February, you know, maybe you've got everything done by then, so you go to "Submit Survey."

So again, we encourage you to check out one of your reports, verify everything looks good, and then I would hit "Submit Survey for Review," and when I do that, an e-mail gets sent off to one of the PMCs to review your report.

And until you hear back from them, you don't have to worry about anything, and if they spot any problems, they'll be in touch to let you know what's going on and ask for any help or feedback in fixing things, but that should be mostly it.

So again, it's mostly just a matter of going through all these sections in the last—filling them out. Probably isn't a ton of fun, but hopefully it isn't too painful anymore, and by doing this, we get to put together a nice report about the impacts of all these coalitions.

SANDRA LOI: Are we ready for questions?

NICK MUERDTER: Yeah. Well, I've been talking for awhile.

SANDRA LOI: Well, before we go ahead and open up the lines, we have a couple of online questions. Let's try to get through these real quick. Mark Bentley submitted a question, and he is asking related to total people reached, understanding that people who attended an event. I guess this is related to the "Outreach Activities" section.

What about the people reached via media coverage of the event? Is there a place maybe for that, or is that being accounted for at all?

NICK MUERDTER: I'd like to think that the media and/or, like if you're having a press event, I would like to think that there was some estimate as to how many people were reached through that press event. We kind of leave that up to the media outlet, but I think most of them have a pretty good idea as to their reach.

But if the question was should you count the people reached at the end of say the newspaper release, yeah, you count all the end users.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, great. The second question I have here online is from Kelly Gilbert. Her first question is "Is there a definition of stakeholder included in the survey?"

NICK MUERDTER: That is something we will be clarifying, and I think yeah, it isn't quite in there yet, but Caley, do you want to...

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah, so in Rapid City during my presentation, for those of you that were there, I tried to get kind of a feel for if we could come up with consensus on a definition for "stakeholder," and the answer is no.

And so it's really you guys at its core and who you consider stakeholders. Would some of you consider stakeholders for people that have—you have—strict definitions, people that have signed MOUs, people that paid dues, people that are on a pretty concrete list of stakeholders?

And then others have a very loose definition of stakeholders, such as those that, you know, participate in your blogs, those that are on your news outlet list, even those that you work with and influence.

And so as for now, we don't have a strong definition of stakeholder, and we'll include a little pop-up question in the survey that kind of helps give you a feel for what other coordinators view as a stakeholder, but yeah, it's pretty open.

SANDRA LOI: So the second question from Kelly was "Will there be a new data collection spreadsheet to combine data collection for fuel blends, new data for grants, et cetera?"

NICK MUERDTER: Oh yes, that is a good point. We need to update, so for those that aren't aware, there's this stakeholder survey template, which I think is what was being referred to, and the idea is you'll send this Excel spreadsheet to your stakeholders to help gather information for the survey.

And this is one thing that I'll need to update this week, but yeah, all those new questions that we add in there will be included in this stakeholder survey. And the idea is you would send this spreadsheet on to individual stakeholders and get responses back via e-mail, and then you input all the details into the online survey itself.

And this basically has all the same sections as the online survey but in a spreadsheet form that you can send out. And one thing I'd mention from last year is, you know, if you're sending it out to a fleet that you know only has alternative-fuel vehicles and off-road vehicles, then in Excel, you can delete all of these other tabs, you know, to make it a little easier.

So I would, you know, customize. Feel free to customize this Excel spreadsheet if, you know, you know specifically to only have certain categories of information, and that should also make it easier for your stakeholders to fill out.

SANDRA LOI: And the last part of Kelly's question is "Is the GGE reduced for biodiesel blends intentionally zero?"

NICK MUERDTER: Yes. She noticed that. That was fixed by the end of this.... She's astute. Yeah.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, I have a couple of more online questions, but let's go ahead. Operator, can you go ahead and open up the lines, and we'll just start getting people in the queue, and we'll just try to go back and forth so hopefully we can get to everyone's question?

COORDINATOR: Thank you. We'd like to begin the question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one. Please unmute your phone and record your name. To withdraw your question, you may press star two. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, so while we're waiting for the first questions to come in, we have a question from Rebecca Otte. Can we enter in biodiesel blend for off-road equipment, or do we just use the amount of biodiesel used as opposed to blended biodiesel?

NICK MUERDTER: I think we're now—we only for off-road vehicles have an option for B100 usage.

CALEY JOHNSON: And maybe we should expand that. How tough would that be?

NICK MUERDTER: I don't know if I want to promise anything right now to get done by the end of this week. We will investigate adding fuel blend to the off-road section, but for now, I would say you just have to select B100 and then input the amount of B100, so that requires a little math on your end.

But you know, there was B50 being used then, you know, if you know 100 gallons of B50 was used, then for B100, you would input 25 gallons. That's right.

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah.

NICK MUERDTER: Okay.

CALEY JOHNSON: My division by two is strong.

SANDRA LOI: Okay.

CALEY JOHNSON: And if you don't have time to do it this next week, we'll put it on the list of things to do for next year.

NICK MUERDTER: Yeah, yeah.

CALEY JOHNSON: It seems like a pretty good...

NICK MUERDTER: Yeah, that's a good idea, so thanks for noticing that.

SANDRA LOI: Thanks, Rebecca. Do we have any questions in the queue?

COORDINATOR: Yes, we do have a few. First one comes from Rick Price.

RICK PRICE: Yes, this is Rick Price from Pittsburgh, a region fleet city. Since I'm new, I guess I need to find out what about electric charging stations and electric vehicles?

CALEY JOHNSON: The electric charging stations go under the alternative fuel stations added in, and then electric vehicles are under alternative fuels and vehicles.

RICK PRICE: Okay.

CALEY JOHNSON: One tricky thing is the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. We're still considering more on the hybrid electric vehicles, so you want to enter those into the fuel economy improvement section.

That was one thing we were debating whether to include those over in the alternative fuel vehicle section or the fuel economy improvement section, and we left them with hybrids just to make them easier to find.

SANDRA LOI: Great, thank you. Next question?

COORDINATOR: Next question comes from Kevin Herdler.

KEVIN HERDLER: Hey, it's Kevin. In the grant section, you've got DOE and FCO and ARRA. If it's somebody else, do you want that under partners, or do you want that under just notes like...

NICK MUERDTER: You mean the source of the grant?

KEVIN HERDLER: Yeah, source of the grant.

NICK MUERDTER: Yeah. I would say add them to the partners, yes, and yeah, maybe we'll try to clarify that.

KEVIN HERDLER: Thanks.

CALEY JOHNSON: The only reason that we have DOE and the State Energy Office and the ARRA as separate checks is not because they're more important, but we get more questions about those three groups, and so we wanted to be able to differentiate them easily.

NICK MUERDTER: Okay.

SANDRA LOI: Great, thanks, Kevin. I'm just going to take another question from the Web. Lisa Thurstin asks how do I list a fleet that uses B20 in the summer and B5 in the winter?

KEVIN HERDLER: I would say add them actually as two separate fleets, so if you know their B5 usage during the winter and B20 usage during the summer, when you add the vehicle inventory here, this fleet name again is really just up to you.

So if I have Fleet A B5 winter, you know, I could just give it a descriptive name like that and then down here I would select biodiesel and, you know, enter 5%, and then I could add a completely separate fleet that would be B20 summer and enter 20% there.

So really, the distinction of fleets here is really up to you, and you can sort of subdivide fleets however you want, and really it's just a name to give to help keep things organized on your part.

CALEY JOHNSON: And you want to cut something in half when you're doing that. If you're entering in the amount of fuel used, you want to report just that, you know, just the amount of B5 and then the amount of B20. But if you don't know the amount of fuel used and you're using the default estimates, I would cut the number of vehicles in half for each, you know, so you don't double count because...

NICK MUERDTER: That's a good point.

CALEY JOHNSON: ...these assume that you're using the vehicle year-around.

NICK MUERDTER: Yeah. That is an excellent point so yeah, I guess it isn't quite as easy as I was describing but pretty close...

SANDRA LOI: Can we take another question from the phone?

COORDINATOR: Yes. Next question comes from Bill Sheaffer.

BILL SHEAFFER: Good afternoon I guess over there. Bill Sheaffer from the City of Phoenix. I'm the dummy, way at the beginning of this side of things. Sorry, I was trying to get this thing to work.

When I hit the 2010 survey, I get just a very limited amount of information and no blanks, and I guess I'm back to how can I transfer the 2009 over to 2010 so that I can go back and then edit that?

NICK MUERDTER: So every year right now, you do have to input all new data. We do allow importing the previous year's outreach activities as I showed, but otherwise for everything else, you will have to visit every section and add anything you did during 2010.

And I see in the past we've experimented with exporting everything from previous years but I think we've realized this leads to better data by, you know, actually having you go through and add any stuff—anything you did during 2010.

BILL SHEAFFER: Okay, well when I bring that up, sorry to be the dummy, but I, under like fuel blends, my report—my open report for 2010 sort of stops at fuel blends, and I'm not quite sure how you open it up to more. I've got one that I put in because I knew that a new distributor had come on-board, so I filled out the 2010 report. I just put his, you know, his name in and his volumes, but I'm not quite sure how to get anything else on this piece of paper.

CALEY JOHNSON: You mean that on the left navigation, it doesn't go any further than "Blends"?

BILL SHEAFFER: I don't show any. I've got Page 2 of 2, and that's it.

NICK MUERDTER: Are you in the PDF report?

BILL SHEAFFER: Yeah, yeah.

NICK MUERDTER: Ah, okay, so you won't edit or add anything in the PDF report. You'll need to close out of that and actually go to the Web site, which I'll back up here so when you first enter the Web site and once you log in, you'll get to this main page.

And if you view any of these archive reports or if you view any of the reports, you'll get that PDF, which is just a static image of what your report looks like right now, but you can't edit anything through there.

To do that, you'll head into the 2010 survey section, and then you should see this screen with all the stuff on the left-hand side, and you'll actually add stuff in by clicking on the left-hand side and then adding inventory, yeah.

BILL SHEAFFER: Okay, so I was just on a static, uneditable thing.

NICK MUERDTER: Right. You were just viewing the PDF.

BILL SHEAFFER: Okay.

NICK MUERDTER: Yeah.

BILL SHEAFFER: All right, so guess probably it's the better part of valor then to pick up all this information as to perhaps even print it out so we've got a list of what we submitted from last year.

NICK MUERDTER: Yeah, yeah, that could definitely help to go back to your 2009 survey and view it as a PDF and print that out and the PDFs. The nice thing about them is they print out very nicely, and yeah, you can sort of use that as a reference for a starting point.

BILL SHEAFFER: Yeah, so that I can actually—then I can use that as a reference to the people I'm asking to say what kind of changes have you made from this, and, you know, that makes the report easier for them to fill out rather than to go from scratch.

NICK MUERDTER: Yeah.

BILL SHEAFFER: Okay, very good.

SANDRA LOI: Thanks, Bill. Another question?

COORDINATOR: This question comes from Ronald Flowers.

RONALD FLOWERS: Yes, this is Ron Flowers in Washington, D.C. As a new coordinator and looking at the information that speaks in terms of activities or how much time was spent as a coordinator in 2010, what do you—all the activities they had or the lack thereof—how should we respond if you're just taking over?

CALEY JOHNSON: Can you talk to your predecessor or somebody that knows and maybe has an idea as to how many activities your coalition did?

RONALD FLOWERS: Okay, so you know, I will attempt to so whatever information that they can provide me with along those lines would be what you would—you put in—is what you're saying?

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah, and also I would look at the 2009 report to see what was done last year, you know, and maybe if there's someone that can kind of verify if that was done again in 2010. You can kind of mark those off the list and, you know, resubmit those.

RONALD FLOWERS: Okay.

SANDRA LOI: Great, thanks, Ron. I'm going to take another online question. Yvonne Anderson asks—or she didn't ask—DHE emissions are well and good but perhaps more meaningful to many of our programs are criteria pollutants.

What are the chances of getting some estimates of NOx and PM offset or reductions?

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah, I've actually looked into that some since our meeting in South Dakota, and we have a new person, George Mitchell, that is looking into that, and hopefully we'll be able to add them next year. We just kind of ran out of time to add that in next year, but it's looking quite positive.

I think we have some good sources of those numbers now and those conversion factors, and I think as long as we can get some more of next time, I think we can add those in for next year's survey, but unfortunately, we don't have the resources to do it this year.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, great. Can we go back to the phones? Do we have more questions on the line?

COORDINATOR: No further questions.

SANDRA LOI: Okay. Well, I've got three more online questions. Mark Bentley asked or stated and asked: "Many government entities, cities, et cetera, have a non-calendar year-end for 2010." Then, "Can we use their 12-month figures or, as an example, if they run from October 2009 through September 30, 2010, I guess to input the data. Would that work for the 2010 year?"

CALEY JOHNSON: I feel like that's a pretty good estimate for fuel use. For the outreach activities, you might want to, you know, slide it over and look at, yeah, and consider what you've done in the following three months in between. I mean, for October and November and December and add those, but as far as fuel use, I feel that that's a pretty good estimate.

NICK MUERDTER: And if you have good numbers for that entire year, yeah, probably preferable.

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, great. Another question from Wayne King. Oh, so Mark actually came back, and he said that the question was only for fuel use in terms of the timing, but how long's the timing?

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah, I think that works fine using the fiscal year instead of the calendar year.

SANDRA LOI: Great, great. Thanks, Mark. So from Wayne King, he asks concerning updates to electric stations, does the new-generation technology count as new, or would the new be a totally new location that did not have an electric charging station before?

What he's trying to say is he has four charging units and was going to add another one to that station—is each charging unit considered a station?

CALEY JOHNSON: That's a good question. I think it would be. Just for accounting purposes—like we're just kind of looking for numbers for how many new stations—basically, new like sources of fuel Clean Cities is responsible for adding in.

So I think this may come back to bite us, but I think that should count as separate charging units because, you know, it's different than just adding like another dispenser to the same E85 tank because you're still using the same E85 tank.

You know, I feel like for charging for EVSEs, we're actually looking for kind of the charging units and not just looking at the locations because I think a lot of the electric charge units are going to be added to kind of larger parking lots.

In which case it would be kind of a shame if you have like a fleet of electric vehicles, and you had a large number of electric charge stations, and you're only able to get credit for one of them.

SANDRA LOI: Wayne actually came back and just as an additional piece of information, last year, he added five new chargers for their Mini E cars and showed five on the survey, so it's five new stations.

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah, I think yeah, I think that's the way the fleet wants them to report.

NICK MUERDTER: I also had a little clarification for electric stuff in that new stations area that we are looking for individual chargers.

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah, okay.

SANDRA LOI: Oh, that'd be great, yeah, on the actual survey it kind of involves more details.

CALEY JOHNSON: Yeah.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, great. So another question from Don Francis online here. On ARRA grants, do we list all the grant recipients or only those who received funds in 2010?

CALEY JOHNSON: I think that would be a good case of where Nick has added clarification and actually made it easier both for you to report and for us to figure out the grant picture of what's going on so there's a good case study.

I think it would be best to add the grant and put the starting year as 2009, and that way, we know how it connects to the 2009 grants that you reported, and it gives us all the numbers we need to kind of get a breakdown of how much was used in 2009—how much was used in 2010.

So if I were you—so Nick has the script up that we need to be looking at—I would put in the grant year began 2009. Put in the total grant amount, total matching funds, and then it should calculate how much, or it should estimate how much of your grant you spent in 2010, and if you have better numbers for how much was used in 2010, type those in—replace those estimates.

And if you don't have better numbers, use those estimates, which essentially just divides the total grant amount by two because it was used over two years.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, great, well that's all I have from the Web. Operator, are there any more questions on the phone lines?

COORDINATOR: No questions at this time.

SANDRA LOI: Okay, great, well thank you so much. Well, I just want to thank everyone for joining us today. Thank you to Caley and Nick for walking us through the survey.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact them or myself. We have recorded and will be posting video and audio on the Web for folks so you can go back maybe and catch up on something or for folks who couldn't attend.

And just a reminder that we will have another Webinar this week. It's the electric vehicle quarterly discussion Webinar this coming Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, so I hope you can join us for that and have a great week. Thanks for joining us.

COORDINATOR: This concludes today's conference. Please disconnect at this time.