 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute and we are so glad to see you all here this afternoon for this briefing looking at the deployment of electric vehicles, the plug-in electric vehicles, and the difference that they can make. As we're all seeing, talk about plug-in electric vehicles in all sorts of ads and all sorts of articles. There are any number of communities across the country that are starting to put in charging stations. And I think that every place that I've gone, talked to people, there's been a lot of excitement about these vehicles and about the opportunities that they really do offer as we look at transportation as we move into the future and as we think about how we can address a multiple number of issues in our society, let alone people finding that electric vehicles are just plain fun. So we are very, very pleased to be able to have this briefing this afternoon and key to holding this briefing has been our partnership with Congresswoman Janice Hahn's office. She has introduced legislation in support of plug-in electric vehicles, has been very, very interested in helping promote their deployment across the country, feeling that again it addresses many, many issues for this country. And so to make opening remarks, I would like to turn to her communications director, Henry Connelly, who has been with the Congresswoman since she came to Congress and he also comes out of Yale University and he handles the Congresswoman's energy and environmental policy issues. Henry? Thank you Carol. Thank you all for joining us on this rather dreary Tuesday and also many thanks to ESI and John Michael Cross in particular for helping us put together this event and assembling this auspicious panel. As I think we all know at this point, our reliance on oil to drive our economy is increasingly untenable. Aside from the environmental costs, costs to our climate, there are real national security burdens which are starting to arise. As anyone who has been paying attention to the difficulties in creating comprehensive sanctions against Iran have noticed, our reliance on oil has made these efforts somewhat cumbersome and has allowed nations that may not wish us well to exert considerable influence and considerable leverage over the state of our economy and the livelihoods of Americans. This is obviously nothing new, but as the situation continues, more and more we're going to have to get serious about doing something about it. The economic damage of rising fuel costs is of course something that in a weak economy has been especially apparent and the additional tragedy is that these costs are most often felt most acutely by those who are least able to afford presently expensive electric vehicles. However, they stand to benefit the most should electric vehicles finally allow them to divorce their family budgets from fluctuating gas prices, which as we know in this world of developing nations and limited oil supply is only going to go up despite whatever fluctuations we may have at present. So the need of the moment is clear and fortunately the remedy has never been more viable than it is today. Electric vehicles are no longer the domain of futurists to be discussed in the context of personal flying airplanes or hovering cars or anything like that. However, more must be done to accelerate deployment. Electric vehicle deployment at present must overcome obstacles to adoption that are both real and imagined. Some of this is the familiar term of range anxiety, which is the anxiety of course experienced by electric vehicle drivers who worry whether they will run out of electric battery before they can reach their destination and so do not test the full range of their vehicles. The truth is this is mostly damaging, most acutely damaging for those prospective owners as some of the members of our panel can attest. Once you actually have an EV you become rather familiar with the difficulties of its range or, I'm sorry, not to say difficulties, that you'll find that your daily routine often fits conveniently and snug securely within the actual range of the car. However, this serves to deter many prospective EV buyers from adopting the vehicles. This leads us to somewhat of the chicken or the egg argument of charging infrastructure versus vehicles, which means that at some point some actor will have to take a bold step to either push a large scale new vehicle purchase or to dramatically expand public charging infrastructure. Add to this that at present this is a very nascent industry. We face some of the beta versus VHS challenges of charger standards, networks and signage that serves to fracture the market more than would be preferable. Now we all know that the training wheels have to come off eventually, but for the time being there's a clear role for government to push us over the hump. One of these items is of course the purchasing tax credit, which serves to dramatically reduce the cost of electric vehicles and there's something to be said for public charging infrastructure that will be developed ahead of market demand. Unfortunately, we have also at this moment of opportunity encountered heightened resistance. At this critical point in the EV narrative when we have a burgeoning but still nascent industry, we have found some level of politicization as the good congressman Darrell Lisa has taken a pretty good swing at electric vehicles with his hearings about the Chevy Volt, implying that somehow if you get into a catastrophic accident and then leave the car in your garage for three weeks, it may start a fire, which is something I believe has been rather severely contested and is on its own rather peculiar way to go about these vehicles. However, before then this has been a relatively bipartisan issue. Judy Bigger, Republican Congressman of Illinois, holds as the lead co-sponsor, I'm sorry, lead sponsor of one of the chief environmental vehicle deployment bills, and Senator Lamar Alexander holds the distinction of being the other member of Congress, say of my boss who drives a Nissan Leaf. At this moment, and especially coming upon the coming tax reform debate, we're caught between managing expectations and maintaining the ambitious scope and momentum of electric vehicles. Roy Disarticle recently overblowing the cost of the Volt shows some of the peril that we face in maintaining a message that does not allow our advocacy to present stories of boondoggle. Environmental marketing versus national security pitch. One of the interesting features is that although these cars are sold often as environmentally responsible vehicles, this can work at cross purposes to persuading House Republicans who are more persuaded by national security concerns. And when their constituents come to identify these cars with environmentalism, they may be reluctant to embrace the very real national security benefits to be presented by wide scale adoption. Clearly there's some work to be done. We have to take steps to normalize these vehicles in the public thinking. These cars are viable. They are practical. And the more that we can do to make them familiar, the more that we can advance the critical mass of these vehicles in the marketplace. And so that neighbors who see other neighbors driving to work experiencing no trouble with plugging their vehicle at home, putting over many of the psychological barriers which from now place them in a realm of undeserved futurism. We can achieve a critical mass of market share that will help spur the adoption of these cars and allow us to realize the many manifold benefits of electric vehicles and electrification. Now we have a very distinguished panel and I'm sure they'll have many thoughts about the steps that we can take to do that and the steps that they are taking to advance that. For the sake of my own office, roughly two things that is important that we together work on. Whereas possible, we need to encourage uniform communicating about these vehicles so that we are educating the populace about how viable they are, how easy it is to drive, how fun they are to drive and whether they make sense for your lifestyle because for the majority of Americans the answer is yes they do. Secondly, in particular now we must maintain the political appetite for these vehicles and protect and refine the incentives that encourage their adoption. Now more than ever at this inflection point of electric vehicle adoption and deployment we must be sure to protect the incentives that are keeping us going in the right direction and not allow the debate to be taken by, with all due respect to anyone from this office, the derelices of the world. Our need is too great and the benefits are too evident for us to allow this moment to pass. Now while we must maintain our patience, we must not concede the debate. I'm very pleased that all of you here are here to listen to these esteemed speakers and hopefully learn a little more about electric vehicles and what we can and should do to encourage their adoption. Thank you so much. Okay, thanks Henry. We're not going to take a look at what's going on with regard to electric vehicles, looking at what's happened with regard to R&D, what's happened with regard to fleets, what's happening with regard to how the utility industry is looking at this and the whole electric drive industry. So we are very fortunate that we have a wonderful panel this afternoon and at this time I'd like to introduce our next speaker who is Patrick Davis. Patrick is the program manager of the Vehicle Technologies Program at the U.S. Department of Energy. He has been involved in public service for more than 30 years, working virtually the entire time on the development of vehicle alternative fuel and electrochemical technologies. So he will talk about everything that has been coming out of the DOE program. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here today. It's a fantastic panel. We look forward to your questions later. As you mentioned, you know, I have a long history of government service and I just want to mention I actually started in the Department of Energy 20 years ago and I came to the Department of Energy then to work on electric vehicles. So this is a particular passion of mine. This was back in the days of the EV1, the Toyota RAV4. And so here we are taking a second and I hope much more successful run at it. Today I want to tell you a little bit about our R&D activities at the Department of Energy, some deployment education work. If you're familiar with the manufacturing projects under the Recovery Act, we'll tell you a little bit about where they are, and finally a little bit about the EV Everywhere initiative. So R&D, look, our program is, last year's budget was about $330 million. Over half of that is devoted to electric drive R&D. So I could literally stand up here for a couple hours and tell you every little project we have, and we really don't have time for that. So I just want to give you a very quick snapshot of what we have underway. At the Department, there's three major organizations doing R&D in this space. ARPA-E is one, my own vehicle technologies program is the second and the Office of Science would be the third. The kind of technologies we're working on, very heavily focused on battery technology. You'll see very shortly the importance of battery technology. In the power electronics area, trying to get the cost, size, and weight of these devices down. Electric motors, trying to solve the rare earth issue with electric motors where rare earth materials and permanent magnets have been a significant concern because there's been a great deal of price fluctuation in rare earth as well as just a swing of about a 10x increase in cost over the last few years. Let me worry about how you put all these pieces together in a complete traction system. We worry about the thermal management of these systems. We're talking about devices that are powerful, very powerful, over 100 kilowatts. So even a little bit of inefficiency creates heat. You've got to worry about how you get rid of that. And then finally at the vehicle level, we worry about components that are specific to the vehicle such as HVAC, heating and air conditioning equipment, and wireless charging. Under major goals there, I'll just talk about the battery hole for a second. So our battery hole for 2015 is $300 per kilowatt hour. And ultimately in 2022, we'd like to get down to about $125 per kilowatt hour. So where are we today? This chart shows you that great progress is being made in batteries. I want to say we're quite rigorous with the way we measure battery costs. We use a validated peer reviewed cost model. These are all high volume cost figures. They are figures based on usable energy. And you can see that just from a few years ago, cost of batteries has fallen quite a bit, more than half. So we've gone from over $1,000 per kilowatt hour to about $500 per kilowatt hour today. That would be the cost of today's lithium ion technology in high volume production. And we're quite confident that we're on a track to meet our goal of $300 per kilowatt hour by the end of 2014. And we know that because we feel confident about that because of the technologies that are in the laboratory today that give us confidence that we're going to be able to get there. I will tell you that after $300 per kilowatt hour, it gets progressively more difficult to bring costs down. We're hopeful that we can get to around $125 per kilowatt hour. But it will be much harder than what the great improvements over the last five years have been. So we're focusing on improved cathode technology, higher voltage operation. We're also focusing on beyond lithium ion technology because it's not certain that you can get to those very low costs with lithium ion. And that's about all I'm going to say about R&D. Now we're going to move on to some other topics. Under the Recovery Act, we have what we call the world's largest documentary electric drive vehicle demonstration. We're demonstrating 13,000 vehicles on the road and over 20,000 charging locations. And this is really about the data collection on those vehicles. 130 test miles and about 5,000 charging events are being documented every day. So that's not per week or year. Every day, 130,000 miles are being driven on this fleet. And this data is being made available in summary format at the website shown. Every charging event, we know where it happens, when it happens, how much power was drawn, how much energy was drawn. Every time somebody turns on the key to one of these vehicles, we know how far they travel, how much energy they use. We basically know everything about how the vehicles are being used and the charging. And you take that data and you learn a lot about how folks are using these vehicles. How many miles are they driving a day? Where are they charging? Primarily, where are they charging? If they're doing it in public locations, where are they choosing to do so? And we think this data is vital in the future rollout and continued rollout and commercialization of electric vehicles. Talked just a little bit about training and deployment. Once again on the Recovery Act, we had 10 Recovery Act projects that are focused on education. And this was education of everyone from auto technicians like repair people to first responders to students like undergraduates and graduate students. Those projects, some of them are already starting to come to a close. We have our GATE program, Graduate Automotive Technology Education Program, which is focused on what it says, Graduate Education at 7 Centers of Excellence. We have almost a 25-year history of running student competitions. Our latest competition is the EcoCar 2 competition, a three-year student competition where we are working with 15 major universities across North America with our co-headline sponsor General Motors. And in this competition series, we have helped train about 16,000 students who have moved through that over the last 24 years. And finally, we have sponsored 16 community readiness projects. Most of these projects are also nearing completion, where at the community level, we help with very small amounts of seed funding help communities decide how they are going to prepare for electric drive vehicles, help them plan for where charging might go, help them put in place policies that might help encourage the adoption of these technologies. Policies like addressing concerns with permit time. If you want to install a charger, how long is it going to take you to get a building permit or the permit that allows you to do that? We think it should be under 24 hours. So projects like that that are helping communities get ready for these vehicles. Talk a little bit more about our Recovery Act manufacturing. If you're familiar with this part of Recovery Act, it was almost $2 billion in funding that went to establish the manufacturing facilities required to build electric drive vehicles. First slide here focuses on battery technology. I'm sort of showcasing the Johnson Controls Facility in Holland, Michigan, 175,000 square foot facility. But this also includes facilities at SAP, XIGM, A123, Interdell, East Penn, Dow Cochum, and LG Chem. We focused not only on the battery and cell production, but also on the entire supply chain of this technology. So you see here, Chemitol Foot also now known as Rockwood Lithium. So this is part of the supply chain that would help produce these battery technologies. Rockwood, this project, helped support expansion of their lithium production facilities in Nevada and North Carolina. They're a major domestic supplier of lithium. But other projects in the supply chain included separator manufacturers, cathode manufacturers, even the folks who build cans that cells go into. So these awards supported Cell Guard, Honeywell, BASF, NG2, Nova Light, Future Fuel, Pyrotec, H&T Waterbury, and Tota America. And then I'll finish on the Recovery Act projects by focusing on magnet E. So it wasn't just about batteries, it's also about the other components that need to be manufactured. Electric motors, power electronics, even components such as capacitors that are required by these devices. The magnet E-car project is in Grand Blight, Michigan. 50,000 square foot facility suppliers to the Ford Focus EV. Other projects supported were General Motors, Delphi, Alson Transmission, Ford, Remy, and UQM, producing everything from power electronics to transmissions for electric drives. EV everywhere. We're really excited about EV everywhere at the department. This Grand Challenge was the second Grand Challenge designated announced by the department back in March of this year when the president announced it. The focus of the first Grand Challenge, by the way, was the SunShop Initiative focused on cost reduction of solar technologies. The EV Everywhere Grand Challenge has the goal of enabling U.S. companies to produce electric vehicles that will be as affordable and convenient for the average American family as today's gas-powered vehicles and to do so within the next 10 years. So most of you probably know that electric drive, one of the issues to market introduction is cost. How do we get cost down? How do we make these vehicles competitive with the vehicles sold today? So for this initiative, we're focusing on a benchmark mid-sized sedan. We're looking at payback within five years, meaning the savings that you'll achieve from fuel, essentially your reductions in your fuel costs, will pay for the vehicle within five years. The EV framing document is available on our website, easy to find by just doing this internet search on EV Everywhere. And we've held five stakeholder workshops this last summer, starting in June, on everything from the overall initiative to individual technologies. And the EV framing document is open for public comment through the end of October, and we'd certainly invite anyone to take advantage of that. We'll finalize this initiative later this fall and for a final rollout in the winter time. Let me just end with two thoughts. One, a lot of times when we talk about electric drive vehicles, people are thinking of one or two vehicles they've heard of. Most of these vehicles are available today. All of these vehicles are available in the next 12 months. So we're not talking about just one vehicle or two vehicles. We're talking about a lot of vehicles being available. This is not a fluke. It's not something that one company is just getting behind. This is something that has some momentum. We need to make sure that momentum continues. And I'll just finish as Henry commented on as an opening remark. To us, this is about energy security. We're highly dependent on petroleum. We use two-thirds of our petroleum in the transportation sector. It's about economic security. We're spending over a billion dollars a day just on the imported petroleum we consume. And it's about environmental stewardship. So we think electric drive is an important tool to help the nation address these key issues. Thank you so much. Thanks very much, Pat. And I must say it's always really encouraging to hear what else has been happening in terms of driving down the cost of batteries and the kinds of progress that is being made there since that is so often talked about as a key issue. And also I think it's so exciting to see how so many automakers are really incorporating electric drive and EVs into their vehicle lineups. Just wanted to mention there is a seat here and there's a seat up here if somebody wants to take it. Okay. Our next speaker is Genevieve Cullen. And Genevieve has been with the Electric Drive Transportation Association EDTA since 2005. She is vice president of EDTA. Prior to going to EDTA, she has done stunts in the executive branch and also working on the hill on the Senate side. So we're delighted that Genevieve is here with us today. Good afternoon. As Carol said, I'm Genevieve Cullen and I'm with EDTA. And it probably is worth mentioning, taking a moment and explaining who EDTA is. We are a cross industry trade association. We represent the entire value chain of companies involved in electric drive. So that is companies who do lithium and rare earth materials to utilities such as Southern California Edison, OEMs, all the major automobile manufacturers as well as Glee purchasers such as UPS, and infrastructure providers, and electrical integration companies. So we cover pretty much the gamut of electric drive. And our mission is the electrification of transportation. And that means it's hybrids, it's battery electric vehicles, it's plug-in hybrids, and it's fuel cell vehicles. And for those of you who don't know that, that's what a fuel cell makes is electricity. That's a pure battery, a pure electric vehicle too. And so where we're standing today, I wanted to put that in context, what we're talking about in plug-in transportation in context of electrifying transportation. And that's where we're moving toward all the reasons that have been so ably explained. The security hazard, the economic hazard, and the environmental hazard for those in the room who still believe in environmental hazards. Yes, there are those associated with combusting oil. So I just wanted to just take a moment and put that in context. And as Patrick said, there is, within plug-in transportation, it's important to realize that there are battery electric vehicles operated solely by batteries and plug-in hybrids. They have different ranges, different price points, different sizes, capacity. There isn't just one vehicle or one range when people say, an electric vehicle doesn't meet my needs, there isn't just one electric vehicle, there's a lot. And we'll talk about that, but I just want to give you some context as we move into this. Okay, so just sort of a snapshot of the market. The GM Bolt and the Nissan Leaf were the first plug-in vehicles to market in, at the very end of 2010, in limited market rollout. So, you know, all of the press you're hearing about the relative success of this market is based on less than two years in the market and not even full market rollout at that. And the next, by the end of this year, there'll be more than 20 plug-in models available. And by the end of 2015, there'll be more than, there's another two dozen have been announced. Coming to the market, the national and regional market for infrastructure is going rapidly. The industry analysts have pegged that it's being worth somewhere five to ten billion dollars by 2015. So, let's get a sense of the numbers. Oh, didn't I print that so small? So, the sales numbers on plug-ins for August was just over, was just under 5,000. It doesn't sound like a lot in a big light duty vehicle market. But the fact is, that's more than a 56% increase over the prior month. That's over 183% increase over the prior year. And so, to date this year somewhere, actually the September numbers are out today. I haven't seen them yet though. But using the August numbers, we're looking at just under 26,000 vehicles. And that's 170% give or take over this time last year. So, the battery electric and plug-in hybrid market is growing. And it's actually, it's a good roll-out of a new technology that is not at the moment inexpensive. And it involves in some cases a new fueling paradigm. So, I think we think this is a pretty strong roll-out. Just to reinforce what Pat said, these are some of the vehicles that are available now. Again, they are different configurations, different price points, different ranges. And if you look at the difference, you know, between a Tesla Model S which has more than 300 miles on us and it's a pure battery electric vehicle. The plug-in Prius is a hybrid that has about 13 miles on its battery but over 500 miles on its combined range. I also just wanted to give you some sense of, again, in context, this is what the hybrid market looks like. Because this is all part of a trend towards electrification. You can't get to where we want to get by regulatory demand or by national security demand. You can't get there without electrification. So, I just wanted to give you a sense of what's coming next. So, all of these vehicles on this page have been announced by manufacturers between now and the 2015 model year. And so, you can see that this is all the major automakers have made a commitment to electrification in all different forms, actually. So, the question I think that we're all trying to answer, right, is, so we think this is a great thing and it has great promise. How do we speed achievement of commercial scale? That's the question. We're all standing sort of in this valley of depth of where people have made substantial investments in this technology. But before you can get to commercial scale and bring down costs and sell in more volume, we have to get this withholding market. So, you know, as an industry, my members are investing significantly in the technology and in building markets. And we are working a lot with the Department of Energy. It's done great work. Thank you back. There's bipartisan support on this. You know, in this political season, there's a lot of noise around these things. But the fact is, since I've been working on this, there has been ongoing and solid bipartisan support for, you know, building American industry for being globally competitive in the energy market and for reducing our dependence on foreign oil. So what it, as the policy levers that we're talking about should be aimed at, we need to speed technology advances. So that's increasing battery range and reducing costs of components. It's about addressing market hurdles and essentially that's bringing down market costs and getting sufficient infrastructure installed. And finally, it's about updating our regulatory structures. I'll just take a minute or two and run you through those. So what I mean by speeding, so in speeding technology breakthroughs, what we're talking about is continuing the public and private RD&D that's been going on. And, you know, DOE, as Patrick pointed out, has had great success in bringing down those battery costs. That's a really rapid decline in costs. And they're launching of an EV Everywhere initiative that all of my members are participating in that will lay down the metric score for technology and deployment that's going to help us, you know, make a roadmap to commercial scale deployment. It's going to be really important going forward. And as far as addressing market hurdles, just specifically there are tax incentives in place that help bring down the initial costs of this technology. So the plug-in electric drive vehicle credit is an important one to consumers to speak from between $2,500 up to $7,500 for the purchase of the vehicle. And it's an important market mechanism. But in addition to that, there is an investment tax credit for alternative fuel infrastructure. We just call the charging credit, but it applies to all alternative fuels. Unfortunately, that credit expired at the end of 2011 and we are working hard with our members of Congress and their staff. Just to see that back gets extended. And I think it's also important that in looking at incentives that is to look beyond light duty because electrification actually is not just cars. It's also medium and heavy duty trucks and they have a great role to play. Not only in reducing gas consumption or diesel more specifically and emissions, but in fact in helping industry achieve economies of scale and components. Also, another part about moving markets is supporting deployment programs. Clean cities has been in place for a long time. They do great work. It's regional voluntary efforts to put alternative fuel vehicles and infrastructure in place. It's a small program. It would be cool. It will really a lot bigger. And I think there's also something that we work with state, local and federal government and a lot of this is going to depend on information sharing. There's a lot of really successful efforts going on regionally. What's happening in California and Oregon. Actually, in Michigan, there's in Austin, people on local governments and communities are putting vehicles and infrastructure in place. And the lessons they are learning, they can share with other communities that what is the right amount of time? How do you speed up that permitting process for installing a charger? Everybody shouldn't have to learn it for themselves from scratch. And finally, what we need to do is we have to make sure that our old regulatory systems actually recognize the value of this new technology. This is at the intersection of the stationary power and the transportation sector. And how to value those emissions reduction, those efficiency benefits in things, you know, in the obvious one is the fuel economy rules. But they're also in our regulations governing utility policies and how they recognize how they encourage time of use pricing. And also, and this is to you again, Pat, you know, the federal regulations that govern state and local fleets and how you comply with those efficiency requirements. They need some updating to recognize what the what new technologies are available to fleet buyers. I know that you all have been working on it, but that's it for me. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Genevieve. And obviously utilities are an important piece of this whole picture as well. And to talk a little bit more about that and the role of utilities and how they view this whole move with regard to increased transportation electrification is Edward Kerr, who is the director of Southern California Edison's plug-in electric vehicle readiness program. And Ed has worked around the auto industry for around 30 years, and he's also been involved with the utility industry for a lot of years. So it is indeed a perfect marriage. Thank you. Well, I'd like to start by telling everybody how disappointed I am with this panel. Because not one of you got the secret sign that says, wrap up, you're going over time. So I'm about to break all the rules. I'm going to completely fix it because I think we need to, for the last two, change this entire paradigm. But actually what I would like to do is start off and talk a little bit about the accomplishments today because I think this part, this question about plugging into our transportation future is really kind of misunderstood a little bit. You know, at the end of the day what we have is we have, I think, significant accomplishments today. We've got administration support. The policies of this administration have really helped this industry, have helped this country begin to plug into our transportation future. We've got political engagement both at the national level and at the local market level. In California, we have a very engaged legislation that supports electrification or transportation, that supports fuel diversity. And it's also interesting enough, you know, this coming from an electric utility guy. You know, we like all electrification of transportation obviously, but fundamentally we need other sustainable transportation solutions as well. We're going to need biofuel. We're going to need natural gas. It's going to have roles to play in our transportation future. It's not one size fits all and it's not just one solution. And I think that speaks a little bit to also what Genevieve was saying. We've got tremendously effective trade associations. Genevieve represents the Electric Drive Transportation Association. There's the Edison Electric Institute, which is the voice of the investor owned utilities here in the United States. There are organizations at the local market, like for instance in California, there's the California Electric Transportation Coalition. And that is utilities and automakers. So trade associations are really important. I think what's also important is consistent commitment. In the case of Edison, you know, we've been supporting transportation electrification for well over 20 years now. And our chairman, Ted Craver, is the recent past chair of Electric Drive Transportation Association. And he is also co-chair of Edison Electric Institute's CEO Transportation Task Force. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to build these coalitions because it's not about one company and one solution. It's got to be something that is scalable for the nation. And that requires all of us to be fully engaged. And then speaking of engagement, local cities are really important in this whole equation. And there's across the country you're seeing this kind of grassroots effort to support transportation electrification. And cities are really important to that. So, so far we've got over 50,000 plug-in vehicles, modern plug-in electric vehicles on the road today, over 50,000. And Genevieve said she didn't have the latest sales. Well, I just went straight on the internet and I got the latest sales. So General Motors hit another sales record. So it was about 2,851 units, I think. The Nissan Leaf sold almost 1,000 units. So they're up big time. Carlos Cohen was talking about this being the first month of the beginning of the turnaround for leaf sales. And I believe Toyota sold about also about 1,000 plug-in pre-assists. So to put one of those sales numbers in perspective, the Volt, 2,851 units. Basically, as of last month, they had outsold about 50% of all the car lines that the United States sales today. About 50%. It was almost 100 car lines year today. So I think, you know, when somebody says, ah, these things just aren't selling, nobody's buying them. That's not true. In fact, if you look at where we are in the plug-in vehicle market in terms of sales, it's about 2X where we were at the same point in market development for hybrids a decade ago. About 2X. So I think that bodes pretty well for the future of plug-ins in the United States. So I think that be careful that we don't get caught up in the rhetoric of what's driving somebody's position because at the end of the day, I think the sales numbers are speaking for themselves. I think who else is speaking for themselves is the customers. We shouldn't forget this part. The customer voice is very loud and very compelling. One of the things about plug-in electric vehicles, and okay, I'm a bit strange. I'm sure most of you are completely surprised to hear me say that. But I've been driving electric vehicles for half my career. So I have about 119,000 EV miles on an old Toyota RAV4 EV from the 1990s. And then I have about 7,500 miles on a Chevy Volt. And those 7,500 miles, of those 7,500 miles, about 5,800 of them are all electric. It's an electric car. But it also has this range extender. So I don't have any concerns about range anxiety, which Henry was talking about. So we've got to be careful about not categorizing electric vehicles and defining them just one way. And that was what Genevieve was trying to say. They come in a variety of different flavors to meet the needs of a diverse audience of customers. But these customers are so emotionally invested in this technology. There is this incredible visceral connection that you get when you drive an electric car. It sounds, they love the way it feels, they love the acceleration, the acceleration. Electric cars only have two speeds, go and stop. Okay, no gears. They're little rocket ships. They're not golf carts. So there's this incredible feeling that customers get. And one of the things that they love is the way people look at them. And the reaction that they get driving down the road on the freeway at the local mall. Reaction is that kind of reaction. Yeah, good for you. I particularly love it driving in the carpool lane in California, because you get these great big SUVs driving, you know, in the other lanes. And they're kind of doing this. And you know what? Because they're going to enjoy electrification at some point. You're going to start to see SUVs and trucks with electric propulsion systems in them. You already have it today with gas hybridization. And you will have plug-in technology going in SUVs and trucks. In fact, Mitsubishi will be launching the Outlander in another year or so here in the United States. And that will be a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. So an amazing emotional connection that customers have with the technology. And I often get asked, yeah, but okay, so that's fine. That's the early adopters. Those guys are a bit weird. We've got to get to the mass market. Well, the God's honest truth is we have about 260 million cars on the road today here in the United States. We're selling about 14 million cars a year. And plug-ins are 0.00000001% of it. I think we're not through the early adopters yet. All right. In fact, the early adopters and the fast followers, next five years. So this emotional connection, it's going to be with us for a while. And I would argue actually it's going to be with us permanently. Because a mass market customer buying a plug-in vehicle today will still have that same emotional connection. It's not a rational logical purchase. When we come to buy automobiles in the United States, it's the second most emotional purchase we make next to our houses. And many of us actually can't afford to buy houses today. So in many cases, it's going to be the first emotional purchase that we make in our lives. So about now 75 to 80% of the market is plug-in hybrids. About 50% of the market is connecting at level one. So that's like they drive the car home from the lot and they literally plug it in just like any other appliance in the house at 110 volts. And then about 50% of the market is saying, you know what? I want a bit faster charging. So they're putting in some infrastructure in their home to support the fueling of the vehicle. But the vast majority are fueling at night. And utilities love that. All right? Because that's when we've got a lot of excess capacity. The DOE did a study some years ago to kind of look at the U.S. grid. The U.S. grid, which is 100% U.S. It's 100% domestic. We don't import any feedstocks to make electricity in the United States. We make it all within our borders for the most part other than importing a little bit of energy from Canada and from Mexico. So it's domestic. So the fuel that's going into our transportation future, we control. And this very much goes to Pat's point about energy security. We control it. We're not beholden on anyone to fuel the wheels of the future. And what's interesting, I think, about the grid is there's this tremendous excess capacity. It's a national energy security asset. A lot of excess capacity at night. Enough to basically fuel 75% of all of the light duty cars and trucks on the road today. So well north of 100 million vehicles could plug into the grid tomorrow. I got the sign. Could plug into the grid tomorrow off-peak and we wouldn't have to build one new power plant. Off-peak is the operative word there. But it's natural for the slow to connect off-peak because that's when cars come home at night. And they spend 10 hours at home. Now we're asleep, your car is fueling. And then you wake up in the morning and you've got a full tank and away you go. And the final point, I think, back to this kind of emotion, this emotional connection. You know, today when we go to a gas station, we go to a gas station once a week and we have no control. All right, we have to pay the prevailing price and we can see how volatile it is. We as consumers, I think, are bounded by two emotions, two powerful, incredibly powerful emotions. One is anger and the other is fear. We're angry because so much is out of our control today in our lives. So much is out of our control. And we're scared because we also don't have control. When you plug into the grid, it is all about control. I can choose to fuel during the day. I can choose to fuel at night. I can choose to fuel at level one at level two. I can turn it on. I can turn it off. It all happens when I'm asleep. And that we find from the research is incredibly liberating, incredibly powerful. You feel that connection when you drive past a gas station and not stop at the gas station. So I'll leave you with that thought and look forward to the questions and some healthy debate. Great. Thanks. And aren't we relieved that Ed has no passion about this issue? And I must say, on EESI's board of directors, there's a guy by the name of Roger Duncan, who is the former head of Austin Energy. And several years ago, Roger got Austin Energy heavily engaged and worked with organizing a whole lot of other utilities in the country to look at this whole role of electrification of transportation. Because in Texas, they were doing a lot of work in terms of bringing on wind power. And wind in Texas blows at night, which meant that this was a way that they could really then use that wind energy was to think about putting it into electric plug-in vehicles. So the thing is, I think that as we've been hearing, you know, looking at vehicles, they come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, purposes. They're used for all sorts of different functions. Which is why we thought that it was also really important to look at the very important role of fleets in the U.S. and what could be better than looking at what is happening with Big Brown. And so we have with us Jim Bruce, who is the vice president for corporate public affairs for UPS. And Jim has been working on energy policy for years and years and years. He spent many years as counsel on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Jim? Thank you, Carol. I will not say how far back we go together. It is a pleasure to be here. You should understand that we did not begin with Big Brown. We were actually red. We were the Red Arrow Bicycle Messenger Company. And we've been in business over a hundred years. For the first five years, we were bicycle messengers. It was not until the fifth year that we made the big jump to a Model T truck. And so we gradually evolved into Big Brown. And there are some other accoutrements that go with it to give you a sense of our company. Hopefully, the name Big Brown alone tells you these characteristics. But it wasn't long before we had electric vehicles. These are plug-in electric, lead acid batteries. We had a whole fleet of them in New York City. There are pictures of them. We still have one that I occasionally have brought to Washington for events. It still runs. It's simple, very, very reliable, although we did manage to break the drive shaft, bringing it down from the truck that had hauled it up here. But the basic components are simple. I mean, the attraction of the plug-in electric vehicle was very clear to us 80 years ago. The problem was the batteries. Now, why does UPS care about alternative fuel vehicles? And I really can't see this very well, but we use about a billion gallons of petroleum a year. UPS does. Roughly 400 million gallons of diesel fuel. We have something north of 90,000, almost 100,000 trucks. We have the 10th largest airline in the world. We use a lot of petroleum. And we're in 220 countries, which means we have to answer to governments in many, many places. The big problem for us with petroleum is not so much buying the fuel. It's the volatility in prices. It can cost us hundreds of millions of dollars from one year to the next extra, and we have no way to predict what that will be. In fact, it's the only thing that I'm aware of in our rates where we have to allow for the possibility a fuel adjustment charge. Now, our alternative fuel fleet, which is, since I really can't read what that says, is about 20, almost 2,600 vehicles. And you'll see we test, we have all sorts of things. The most recent is 100 plug-in electric vehicles. These are delivery vans we bought for California. But we have electric hybrid as well, about 400 diesel electric vehicles. Diesel electric hybrid trucks. These are all trucks. The brown truck that stops in my office up here on Pennsylvania Avenue is a diesel electric hybrid. Works great, drivers love it. So we're trying everything, and that's really the essence of our policy, is that we want to understand all of these technologies, and we want to try them in real service. Now, this is a chart I made up. Don't pay too much attention to the numbers, but all it's really trying to say is this. We have lots of different missions for our trucks. We have 17,000 heavy over-the-road tractor trailers. Some of them pulling double, even triple trailers. That is an enormous load. The only thing that will power that vehicle is either diesel fuel or liquid natural gas. And we've been running liquid natural gas heavy tractor trailers for over a decade. We have about 93 deployed. We're about to bring on another 100, and these are extraordinarily attractive. They use 5% diesel, 95% natural gas. But then if you want to move into electric hybrids, it's less range, less weight, but they're very attractive. You'd never use a liquid natural gas engine for a small truck. It makes no sense. So we have these missions like our little brown trucks might go 60 miles range a day, whereas the heavy tractor trailer will go 500 to 600 miles a day. We have a variety of technologies that we're attempting. And as you get to shorter range and shorter weights, then you have all sorts of options. And electric, plug-in electric is definitely one of those options. Now, if you were to say what is the UPS philosophy, we really don't have a dog in the fight. We are fuel neutral. We do what works. And I may have to read this. I can't read it all from there. Let's see. You say, but you like electric drive transportation. Well, no. I mean, the fact of the fact is, we are on the board of the Electric Drive Transportation Association. We're also on the board of the Natural Gas Vehicle Association. And why are we on the EDTA? Because we see that as the future. And we're buying those vehicles now. They make sense. If you look at, as I said, on the heavy trucks, you're talking diesel fuel or LNG. The problem with all of the alternative fuel vehicles is having enough, is using them for enough distance to make up the initial cost of the vehicle. And we see these technologies are making tremendous strides, and we see the cost of the vehicles coming down. What's key has been the federal and state incentives, so that we can get some assistance up front. And that's still the case today. We do believe that Electric Drive, many of our engineers, many engineers generally believe that Electric Drive is where it all goes, eventually. Maybe not for the heavy over-the-road tractor, but for delivery vans and so on. We're very interested in fuel cell trucks. I mean, it's a battery you pour electricity into as a form of a fuel. I built one for a high school fare from scratch. I will not tell you how long ago that was, but I do remember that it was fortunate that judges came around at night because transistor radios get best reception at night. But, you know, I always was amazed by the technology of the fuel cell because it has inherently much higher efficiency than any internal combustion engine. My particular device did not, but the theoretical ones do. And so, you know, we see Electric Drive, whether it's by battery or whether it's by fuel, it can be hydrogen, it can be methanol, all of those are options. And we think we need to be a part of all of those options and understand them. Now this is all of the above strategy, which is something that I think President Obama evolved to, but he is at our Las Vegas facility and that UPS truck in the background, there are two of them. One is a hybrid electric delivery van, the other is an LNG heavy tractor. And he makes the point that it's a matter of all out, all in, all of the above strategy. And that's essentially our strategy. And Electric Drive, plug-in electric hybrid, that's all part of the mix that we see for the future. Now, there is a certain natural progression of technologies. Our trucks have run on petroleum and we started building hybrid electric. These are hydroelectric, even hydraulic hybrid and I won't go into what that is, but the fact is this marrying of internal combustion engines and batteries makes a lot of sense for us. And as I say, we have about 400 of them in service. But we're also moving into the plug-in electric vehicles and the fuel cell is of great interest to us in the future because of the efficiency that you can ultimately get. Of course, the emissions output is, depending on the fuel, maybe as simple as water, water vapor. So the other thing to note is that fleets, because they're essentially fuel, not all fleets are, but ours are. I mean, I can show you a map, I pulled it because of the time of our hubs across the country. All of our trucks come back at night to the same place. So you're ideal for alternative fuels, either charging or refueling or whatever. And so that is probably the most effective place to start if you want to do alternative fuel deployment. Now, the other thing is that because we're in all of these other countries, we're facing environmental requirements. We're going to face urban congestion limitations. We have to be ready to move the truck from point A to B. We don't particularly care what it is as long as it's very cheap to buy the truck. The fuel is cheap and it has no emissions. If we have that, we're happy. And so we're indifferent, but the array of technologies that we're interested in drive us to electric drive. There's just no question about that. This is one of the hundred plug-in electric vans that we bought for California before we painted it brown. This is a heavy liquid natural gas power tractor trailer pulling two trailers. If you looked at it very carefully, you wouldn't see much in the way of difference, and that's the point. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jim. Let's open it up for your questions at this time. And we'll start over here. Go ahead. The thing that puzzles me is that innovations take off when there's a standard. And yet, I'm thinking of standards like the idea of PC. We've all talked about how there's a lot of choices and a lot of alternatives. And that's a good thing, but a standard platform is a good thing too. So I'm interested in your thoughts about that. I would say because I represent a diverse set of makers, and they actually have all big brands of market packs on electrification. And I think while a standard is one way forward, this is the main frontier. And people are looking at their own platforms, and Toyota has bound to build a hybridization into every one of their models. And adding a grid-connected facility or adding fuel cells to that is their path forward. Nissan's path forward is pure battery electric. And everything is tweaked. And I think in this industry, that helps because there are so many different drivers and duty cycles. And duty cycles not even just in commercial applications, but between everybody in this room using their private company, and they need to move four kids, two teens, one set of golf clubs with a 40-mile commute, everybody has a sort of different configuration, and meeting their needs is what it's going to say for us to succeed. All these models that both Genevieve and I showed, if they were all going to build their own design electric motors and their own battery cells and their own power electronics, Genevieve probably would have a little bit of a point. But the reality is there's a limited number of battery manufacturers out there that are going to be supplying these models that are what helps get the volume up and helps supply an industry which is used to making a lot of models. And point it out, the bulk is outselling about half the market right now because half the market is comfortable with selling sales volumes that are below that amount. So this is an industry that really can tolerate a lot of different kind of markets and meetings, if you will. So I think the other thing I would say is that the legacy technology today doesn't come in one place, right? You have four cylinders, six cylinders, V8s, V12s, you know, turbocharging, cylinder deactivation, and that's to meet the needs of the marketplace which are very diverse. So the beauty of electrification is multiple different places. You can have the pure battery electric power, you can have the gas-migra electric power like the Toyota Prius, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of gas hybrids that are on the road today. Millions, actually. Millions. You can have the plug-in hybrid fuel cell, you can have plug-in hybrids, you can have fuel cells. So multiple flexibility with electrification, okay, comes in a variety of different playlists. You can then also pair it with other sustainable alternative fuels like biodiesel or ethanol, natural gas, so when you have a hybrid powertrain you can use an alternative fuel as well as the electricity on board the vehicle in the grid. So I think that lots of flexibility, you don't need one standard. Right, Jeff, did you want to ask? I'll just say, we don't build any of our own trucks. They're all custom-made. The little brown truck you see on the street is a aluminum body, all custom-made, and we have various suppliers and we can provide, we do not retrofit, we rarely retrofit. We build it for 20 years and then we crush it. You never want to use UBS trucks on the street. So we get the benefit of platforms of various manufacturers to pick food. So, I mean, that works for us to have the options of various manufacturers of components, chassis, and it works for us. Can I follow up with a quick one? Okay, quick question, and then we'll go back here. Does that influence the infrastructure building? Are they all compatible across the infrastructure building? Well, from electrification perspective, when it plugs into the grid, there is standards, right? So you have J1772, which is a plug connected standard, and most of the auto industry is following that standard because we're trying to avoid the whole beta VHS situation. When you start to look at multiple alternative fuels like natural gas, like biodiesel, then you do have a situation of multiple infrastructure to support that. But understand, I mean, we're consuming somewhere in the neighborhood, I think 20 million, it was a 20 million barrels of oil a day. We've got 170,000 gasoline stations. So if we are to convert the entire fleet over to alternative fuels, this was the point I was trying to make, you're going to need it all. You're going to need natural gas, you're going to need sustainable biodiesel, and you're going to need electrification. The good news about electrification, recognizing where I come from, the good news about electrification is the infrastructure of all of the alternative fuels, ethanol, methanol, biodiesel, natural gas, nitrogen, electricity. Electricity is ubiquitous. I mean, the gas station is as close as your nearest plug. So from our perspective, it is really not an infrastructure challenge. It's there. We're just focusing on literally the last 50 feet of the energy system. Other alternative fuels, it's a little bit more challenging. I will tell you, in every single case of a sustainable alternative fuel or a new propulsion system, there are pros and cons. There's not one silver bullet in all of this. All of it's got challenges. Because we've been doing this a certain way for 100 months and years, it's going to take some effort for us to do this. But we're definitely on the path. There's a question or comment. Okay, back here. Can you give me an estimate on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions reduction you've achieved through conversion, whether it be natural gas or plug-in? We compute... If you ask UPS, can we enter into a contract with you? Say, for example, toto-toilets. Ever, toto-toilet, toilets, we have a contract with them. And we move their domestic product. We product them on the space. And we compute how much carbon we emit and moving all their products. And we charge them. We can tell them exactly how much it is. And then we can neutralize it. We'll buy carbon neutral credits. We can do that if you want to just shift one package and you want to pay, say it's a ground package, a nickel. We'll offset. We'll buy highly credible carbon credits and retire it. You ask me what you know how much it is. It's not a huge amount. I mean, with a fleet of like 2,500, when we've got 90-something thousand trucks, it's pretty clear it's not a great deal at the moment. But it's growing. As I recall, you know, we're going up at something like 100% a year. The numbers are alternative. I have to go back and check the numbers. But our expansion is rather dramatic in terms of numbers of years. In terms of our total carbon emissions, probably not. I mean, we look at it all in terms of having the lowest carbon intensity that we can. As we grow, our carbon emissions actually go up. But the carbon intensity improves so that the plan is better off. So I think if you look at our sustainability report, I think we actually have enough of it. But, you know, it's small. You know, having said that, I think it's also important to realize that, again, with electrification, it's not just about the car, but it's poor electrification. It's truck stop electrification. It's fundamental sustainable goods and people movement. When you start to add up what is already being electrified today, forklifts. Light duty rail, passenger conveyance. When you start to add all that up, the carbon reduction is pretty down significant when you compare it to patrol. All right? But there's a lot of headroom still to go. But if we are successful as a nation in decarbonizing transportation, it's going to come from electrification. A big piece of it is going to come from electrification. I would just add that, you know, we're in a mode, when you base user rails in the United States, we ship thousands of trailers on the rails. We'll move packages from air to ground because that uses just fuel. So we look at the entire system in terms of how much carbon we avoid, and that's millions of tons of carbon. The alternative fuels will grow over time. It will become significant. All these alternative fuel vehicles have a lower carbon footprint than the diesel. I mean, the natural gas is probably about 25% less carbon emission. Great. Okay. Well, that all brought several comments. Okay. We'll start in the back first, and then we'll come to you. Okay? A couple of you mentioned the role of local government communities in supporting electric vehicle development. And we're here to elaborate a little bit more on staffs and communities can take to just a little bit of UV deployment, as well as support mechanisms to support the communities in this work, particularly with the power grid. I can start. As I mentioned, we had 16 community readiness grants funded through our Team Cities program to help communities look at removing some of these barriers that exist in our unique communities. So I mentioned the permit time. So right now, there's actually 40,000 local jurisdictions that can do permits in different ways. Some permits can be done permit by notification, which is essentially no time to get a permit. Others might take weeks to get. This is not a way to roll out of technology if you're an automaker that has to deal with all the different possible situations that your customers might confront. So that's one thing. Try and get the permit time down. But other than your other policies, that can really matter a lot. I think it was Ed that mentioned HOV lane access. That's really handled mainly at the local level, and that can be a real critical market in any part. Parking policies, that can be everything from municipal parking regulations to how businesses handle it and how you might do public charging. So I mean, there's a lot of policy measures like that. In addition to that, there's also just ways that local communities are going to help plan out where, for instance, where fast charging might be. If you're going to do a network of fast charging that they started in Oregon, you really have to plan at that local level. You just can't wait for people just to start putting in stations in a random fashion. So there's a couple local planning issues that are important. Okay, go ahead. Bob Bruni and I could believe transportation committee. One of the things we hear quite often about standard platforms is that when you look at the gas vehicles, there's 400 models of gas vehicle, and the number one selling vehicle is only used by 2% of the public. So 98% of the public are not even going to buy that one best vehicle. So there's a tendency for everybody to take one electric car and say, that's not for me. And then, because in the whole industry, when the other 9%, 9% might be perfectly happy with that vehicle. And you have about standards. And of course, every car comes with a standard charge board. This is standardized on the vehicle then, and this is standardized on the other. And there's 100 times more of these that are charging stations. So, you know, the grids out there, as Ed has pointed out, one of the statistics that he mentioned was the 50% of all you have to charge today is done on the standard cord. But what that's overlooking is that it's because the other 50%, when you go to work, you can't get your employer to let you plug in because there's not any substance. So the fact is, 20 cents an hour is to do that. For 20 years, I've been trying to get permission to plug into a government outlet, six feet from where I parked. I cannot find anybody in the federal government that can say, yes, you can pay $10 a month, and you can plug into that outlet. Nobody can do that. I think we need an executive order to just do it. We're not asking for free ownership. We want to pay in the plug-in. So I wonder if that statistic of 50% will be higher if people were able to plug in at work. Actually, I think the Senate has moved on that. Both the House and the Senate have passed legislation enabling the architect of the capital to allow charging. So the problem was the concept is you're afraid of getting a tax payer benefit to a private citizen, which is the hurdle between government leaders doing that. But the architect of the capital is going to, he has laid out plans to establish either a subscription system or some kind of a court, and that can be the model for the larger federal government. But it's only for adults who charge them. They're still ignoring all of those outlets that are already involved, that the Senate or could have plugged into. We can change it all in one day. We're going to start here and then we'll move on. But everybody else, I bought the plug-in at work. I'm just in the 110. And no, we charge them because it's too cheap to meter. Right. So we are seeing a lot of changes around. Okay, over here. I drive a 2012 Nissan V. And I charge it in my garage overnight and I'm in the usual paradigm. And then I actually drive it to Metro, to be mostly in Metro, but I could drive it to work. And I have driven that occasionally. And plugged in level one at work. And level one actually makes a lot of sense for charging at work during the daytime, while you're in your office building. And so my question for the utilities is, I know that off-peak charging overnight is great for utilities. But if there's a lot of people doing L1 charging during the day, that's been non-off-peak time. So do the utilities have some sort of disincentive that you're getting to L1 charging? No. So I 100% agree with you. I think level one in non-residential applications makes a little sense in the world. I mean, when you think about, you know, large parking structures, or, you know, already have lighting in there that's used at night, well, the lights are longer than that. So the capacity is already there. The infrastructure is fundamentally already there. What you're talking a little bit about is this issue of, well, if we're encouraging non-residential charging, then aren't we encouraging on-peak charging? And isn't that a problem? So if you look at the market today, plug-in hybrid lets your car light the bolt. The average all-electric vehicle miles traveled was probably about 35 to 40 miles. It's the battery. For the very electric car, the average all-electric B&T vehicle miles traveled today in the United States is about 30 miles. So if you pull up, you've got a brand new battery in the morning. You've got a full battery in the morning. 70% of the market can exist in 40 miles a day. So you're only using a percentage of the battery every day. So you go to work and you plug in at level one. Chances are you're fueling on the shoulders, meaning you're not actually fueling in the middle of the day because you're done. And most major corporations have very sophisticated energy management systems. So they have the ability to interrupt the charging during the peak and then bring it back up again after the peak and you're still going to be done by the time you drive home quite a lot of time for the most part. So I think that, frankly, it is not a challenge today. We don't really see it as a difficult issue today. I think once you get millions of vehicles on the road, two things will happen. One is that the grid will have adapted because the grid over the last 100 years has adapted to what's called low growth. So whether it be plasma TV screens or air conditioning or pull pumps or the Goodyear Blimp on painted rocks, it has adapted. And transportation electrification doesn't happen overnight. It's not a light switch. You don't go from 0% penetration to 100% penetration overnight. So it is happening at a cadence that the grid is adapting to and will adapt to across the country. The second thing that's happening with the grid is the grid is getting smarter because more and more digital technology is being deployed on the grid. And so we will have the ability to see signals will have the ability to communicate with the vehicle. We're developing those standards now so that we have the ability to evolve to what we call smart charging or intelligent charging. When we can ramp it up, we can ramp it down depending on what's going on on the grid. When we talked about winds at night, we'd be able to say, come on cops, get hungry, we'll take more and more of you now because the wind's blowing. Or we can slow it down. But we have these broad windows of time that we can deal with. In the case of off-peak house, in our case, 9 o'clock at night till noon the next day, that's our off-peak window. Plenty of time to fuel vehicles. Plenty of time. So I think that, frankly, we're going to be able to handle it because of those two reasons. The grid attacks and because of the technology that's being deployed on the grid. I really don't see non-residential charging as being an on-peak challenge. Okay, over here. Question for Jim. Jim, what's your return on investment for your trucks, for some of the fuel trucks? You talk about 2,500 trucks that you have. What's your company's expectation of turning that positive at some point in time? And how does that factor into your decision about what to buy? It depends on whether we're getting government assistance. We're on the cusp of possibly being, well, there are certain vehicles where it's very close in certain areas. We have 900 propane trucks in Canada. Certain places, propane, is very, very inexpensive. So it's difficult. I don't want to give you a year to compute it to what's the payback. At what point has it become? Is it five years or three years or seven years? And we know that. I don't particularly want to disclose it. Or 10 years. And believe me, that's all measured very carefully. And we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't see the possibility of doing it in quantity. Because we're losing money, essentially, in all right now. But it's the future. And if you have geometric growth in the numbers of alternative vehicle, then it starts to have a big impact on your patrolling consumption. So I don't know if that's a straight answer or not, but electricity is not there yet. But getting a lot better. Well, it's also interesting to think about other fleets to how many rental car agencies are really introducing electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids into their fleets, which is another very important way to expose the market to these technologies and the myriad applications in terms of kinds of vehicles that now have electric drive. You shouldn't make any assumptions about the passenger car market due to what we're doing in delivery vehicles. They're totally different markets. Far less numbers of vehicles involved. Okay. Here? Here? And then we'll go back there. Okay, go ahead. My question is for Mr. Davis, actually. So you touched upon the use of carbon energy since the efforts on battery R&D. I think it's really important to, you know, improve battery technology to the most potential for driving down costs and improve performance. So I'm wondering, how does the DOE work to pass the technology to the private sector or to help commercialize the technology? The great technology that you've discovered at DOE Research and Development? Okay, good. Well, first of all, I'd like to show you we have a great graph record of getting that technology into consumer products. So for instance, it's DOE guided technology that's in the vast majority of all the current generation of hybrids today. Nicomotor hydride technology. Our technology is in the previous and on the inside. It's essentially most hybrids on the road. And that was because of the work in Nicomotor hydride batteries that we did starting back in the early 90s. And then when you look at lithium ion, sort of a similar story. Our technology is in the Chevy Volt. It's in the battery technology in the Chevy Volt. It's in the Mercedes S-Class. It's really showing up a number of vehicles. And one of the ways that we make sure that these battery technologies that we're developing are relevant to the market is that after we get very close to the market but not quite there with the battery technology, we start that final development phase involving the auto industry. And the auto industry is at the table with us when we work with battery manufacturers to do that final development work to make sure that these batteries meet the needs of the auto industry. So that's one way to ensure that the products and batteries that develop are relevant to the industry. Great. I'll take care of first. Yeah, I guess the principle is questions again. I was trying to hear what you were talking about. 70% of the vehicle is dead by power production. According to the daily study. Right. Yeah, I was just trying to figure out that maybe this isn't in effect in California so much. But EPA rules and fertilitivities, curbing cold produce and dirtier production. Natural gas is coming online. How much do natural gas decisions, pipeline expansion and power production turbines factor into the plug-in? Is there a certain threshold for natural gas advancement to get to the power production level that you need because the grid is sort of being driven toward these certain power generation? So two points. The first point is that all the alternative fuels out there, ethanol, methanol, biodiesel, natural gas, hydrogen, electricity, there's only one that can actually claim that the dirtiest one that you travel is the first day you drive a car and the rest of it just gets cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and that's electric. And the reason for that is because the grid is fundamentally going to get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner, which is what your point was. You know, coal is kind of doing that. Natural gas is kind of doing that and renewables are doing that. You know, in California, 21%, I think it is all of the energy we provide to our customers comes from renewables today. So natural gas is going to grow. We're now the Saudi Arabia of natural gas here in the United States. So frankly, that will benefit transportation the more it connects to the grid. You know, I think coal drops something like 19% last year as feedstock in the US. So, you know, I think that the transportation is going to benefit from the investments in the policies that are being made today here in the United States around the grid. Can I just add to that? But the fact is we don't have to wait for the grid to change for swapping out gasoline, electricity to be a better toy. With the current watch, that study was done when the grid was still more than 50% cold, which is not true today, that you still got, you know, in that grid scenario, more than 50% cold, you still got a third reduction in greenhouse gases, third. And as I said, every day, the carburett cleaner and then throw in the other bank, as opposed to controlling 250 million light-beauty tailpipes, you have a handful, a relative handful of stationary sources which are the most regulated entities in the world, pretty much, as far as their mission. So there's also an ease of clean-out associated. So I think cold's gone from 52% to something like 36%, 33%, 36% somewhere in that area, I think. And still a problem. I think that we're a little past our point at our, and maybe you can follow up afterwards. And one other extra little comment I wanted to add to what Ed had said is that just as I mentioned about our board member in Austin with regards, they are now doing what's called a Baconstrate project which is looking at the whole role of solar on homes, therefore providing the power for electric vehicles for that. So as Ed was saying, things are just getting cleaner and cleaner as we look at the decarbonization of the grid and it just keeps changing. I've got just a quick question. Sure. Madam Chairwoman. I'm just curious. You've got that card. Yes. You've been asking us questions. So how many people have you ever met? Wow. Well done. Well done. And how many people are surprised that they were actually that good? The EV smile. Look at that. It's a new term of art, the EV smile. All right. That's a great way to end the briefing. I want to thank our panel very, very much. I really, really appreciate your being here at Baconstrate.