 Stanford University. Welcome, everyone, to the panel on transportation. So my name is Marco Pavone. I'm the moderator for this panel. The goal of this panel is to discuss the path to decarbonization with a focus on transportation. I'm a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and also of computer science and electrical engineering by Cartisi. And my research is on algorithms for decision-making for autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles, and also algorithms to coordinate future mobility systems, whereby, for example, mobility is provided by potentially electric autonomous vehicles. So the panel, at the beginning, I will ask the speakers to introduce themselves. And then we have about half an hour where I will ask the speakers a number of questions related to the topic of electrification of the transportation system and decarbonization. And then we'll have about 15 minutes at the end where we'll open up a discussion to the entire audience. I think the topic is extremely exciting. I just want to mention that Rahman and I are in the process of launching a new center on sustainable mobility. And the topic that we're going to discuss today is going to be one of the fundamental research pillars for this center. I am honored to be joined in the panel by three very influential thinkers on the topic of sustainable transportation, Professor Ram Rajakupal, Professor Susan Hendy, and Dr. Anand Gopal. And then I will ask each of you to introduce ourselves. Let's start from the left-hand side, so Ram, if you can go first. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. I am a faculty in the civil environmental and electrical engineering departments at Stanford. And my work specifically on the transportation area focuses on how can we get the electric grid ready to support all of the electrification goals for transportation that we have set ourselves up for. And we look into two areas. One is planning and how to project the impact of massive electrification into the grid. And the other one is how to coordinate grid resources with the transportation management and enable a much more faster transition. Susan? Hi, I'm Susan Hendy. I'm a professor at UC Davis in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy and also the acting director of our Institute for Transportation Studies, otherwise known as ITS Davis. So I was asked to say a little bit about research. Please. Transportation research in California now? Absolutely. OK. That was great. So California is, I think everybody would agree, a real powerhouse, no pun intended, when it comes to transportation research. And ITS Davis is right there in the center of it. My colleague, Dan Sperling, who some of you may know because he does the energy work that I don't, he likes to claim that ITS Davis is the leading university research center on sustainable transportation in the world. So you have a lot of competition for your new center. But really what makes? Also collaboration opportunities. Yes, collaboration. Exactly. And what makes the transportation research in California so powerful is the collaboration. A little friendly competition, but a lot of very good collaboration among the universities in the state. So I was just going to mention that we are a part of what's called the University of California Institutes of Transportation Studies. So we partner with Berkeley, UCLA, and Irvine. And we manage a state program called the State Transportation Research Program. There's a similar program for the Cal State universities that's managed out of San Jose State at the Manetta Institute. And then we also at Davis lead what's called the National Center for Sustainable Transportation, which is a part of the Federal University Transportation Centers Program, which is a really nice pot of money for research and education and transportation. And as a part of the NCST, as we call it, we partner with USC, Cal State Long Beach, UC Riverside, as well as Vermont, Georgia Tech, and Texas Southern University. And then just to make it even more complicated, we're also a part of the Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center, which is also a part of this federal program. And that is led by USC. And we, Berkeley, and UCLA are a part of that. So we are networked in very many ways, though not so much with Stanford. And should I say a little more about what we do? Yes, please. OK. So a lot of what we do is to support policy transformation around the goal of equitable decarbonization. We are not so much at Davis doing technology work. We do a little of that, but really we're a lot about policy. And so we do work like building tools to help support policy development and implementation. And if anybody's interested, I can talk about our induced travel calculator, which has caused quite a kerfuffle in the state. We develop policy instruments. We're quite proud of our contribution to the low-carbon fuel standard for the state of California. Evaluation studies, basic research. And I guess one of the points I want to make, and I'll have more time to do that, I think, is that while we are doing a lot of work in support of the state's efforts to electrify transportation, both passenger transportation and freight, we know that that's not enough to get the state towards its goals. So we also do a lot of work around the goal of reducing vehicle miles of travel, otherwise known as VMT. So that's where my work resides. And I can talk more about that. Great, Anand. Great. So I'm Anand Gopal. I'm free of any university at the moment, so I'm happy to say that I have no friendly competition with anybody. Looking forward to cooperation with everyone. I do have connections to universities. I have a PhD from Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group. So the other university across the Bay as is referred to over here. And for about a couple of decades, I worked on various aspects of clean energy and climate policy analysis. Right now, I run a climate policy think tank known as energy innovation. Energy innovation is a policy research firm. And what we try to do is try to inform the best and most impactful policy decisions to reduce the largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions at the speed and scale required by the climate problem. So we tend to work backwards from where policymakers are looking for important technical research to solve or put forward design ideas. And in some cases, legislation, in many cases, just regulations where we can massively reduce emissions. As a result, a lot of our work is in China and the United States. And a lot of our work in the last couple of years has been to do technical research and modeling for the US federal push on climate policy. So our team, along with some others in the private sector, as well as in universities, did. We were one of the three main groups doing modeling of the entire Inflation Reduction Act and all of the policy provisions and what we're going to see in terms of climate benefits, as well as jobs, GDP, public health, and equity benefits that come from acting on climate. So that's the summary of what my team does. We have programs across sectors using modeling for all energy-related sectors. And we have specific programs in electricity, transportation, and industry. And so I'm here to discuss some of our work in transportation, but we also cover a lot of the other energy sectors. And I'm very excited to be part of this panel. I have been connected with both of these folks in a far past in history. So that's also kind of funny to show up here and see you all and honored to be part of this. That's great. All right, so let's get started with the conversation. And electrification is usually discussed as one of the technologies or the technology that is key in pursuit of decarbonization. Susan just stated that electrification is not enough. So what else should be doing? You mentioned the reduction of VMT. Would you mind elaborating a little bit more on that point? Yeah, sure. So the state's own analysis out of the California Air Resources Board shows that, while electrification is essential to meeting the state's goals, we can't do it fast enough to get to where we need to be. So that means we've also got to think about reducing how much everybody drives. We need to reduce VMT. And the state has policy around reducing VMT as well. And I think it's important to remember also that electrification doesn't solve all the problems. Cars in and of themselves are problematic in many ways. We can talk about tires, for example. Roadways themselves, and so on and so forth. So even if we could instantly electrify our passenger and freight transportation system, there'd be a lot of other work that would need to be done. So we're doing some of that kind of work. And I think electrification is hard enough, but trying to get people to think about driving less is maybe our biggest challenge of all. Harder, perhaps, than getting people to stop smoking. So the state is also putting a lot of energy into that effort. And we are assisting them in various sorts of ways. Could you elaborate a bit more on the legislation that is being considered in order to incentivize the reduction of VMT? Yeah, so there are two critical pieces of legislation. I would say one is Senate Bill 375, which states back to, I don't know if I'm going to get the years right, 2008, something like that. And that put a requirement on the regional transportation planning bodies, which are called metropolitan planning organizations. So the MPO here is the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. And set targets for the MPOs in terms of reductions in VMT. And I think that that policy has been perceived as not entirely successful. It created a lot of energy around, energy, use that word here, effort around thinking about regional plans and analyzing regional transportation plans with respect to what they were going to mean for greenhouse gas emissions in the future. But the problem is that to reduce vehicle miles of travel, we need action by local government. And these MPOs have no power over land use planning and what the local governments do. So there's been sort of a disconnect there. Where there's a lot of activity right now at the state level and at the local levels around Senate Bill 743, which also dates back quite a few years, but is taking some time to implement. But that's one that now requires, under the California Environmental Quality Act, that transportation projects, as well as land development projects, any kind of projects subject to CEQA, that the transportation impacts are going to be evaluated with respect to their impact on vehicle miles of travel, since that is really the key driver, pun unavoidable there, for the environmental impacts of transportation. So yeah, so there's a lot of scrambling now to figure out how exactly do we analyze potential VNT impacts. But in the meantime, a lot of push by the state towards actions at the local level that would help to reduce dependence on cars. So, and I can go on and on. You can come up. I have actually quite a bit of a lot of questions. All right, let me just like a little bit of a wrap up. Because I do have quite a few questions. I'm sure that the people here have a bunch of questions. Lots of large. It affects all of us. Right. Action at the local level around, of course, investing in things like walking and biking, transit, huge issue right now. I mean, that's one of our big alternatives to driving. But land use policy, in particular, housing. So the last point I'll make now is that our transportation problem is fundamentally a housing problem. Yeah, that's a good statement. Great. And as I said, I have quite a few full-on applications. I'm sure that a lot of people have full-on applications. Let me continue this conversation about electrification more from the technology side. So you said that even if electrification is going to happen overnight, but we know that that is not going to happen. Actually, significant infrastructural upgrades are needed in order to meet the increased demands. And paradoxically, these infrastructural upgrades potentially might delay our decarbonization goal. So I was wondering if Ram could elaborate a bit more on this topic. Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges right now for transportation decarbonization is that any option, not just electric vehicles, even if you think of other options like hydrogen and so on, they depend on electric power for the production of the fuel. And when you look at the impact of, for example, in the state of California of the established adoption curves that we have for fleets and passenger vehicles and so on, you will require something like replacing 70% of the transformers in the state by 2040. And transformer replacement is something that used to take maybe three to four months. Now timelines can exceed a year depending on where you are. And the rationale for a lot of this is that we tend to think of the transportation system, the electricity grid as all completely independent parts. Exactly, even if you think about transportation in old times, you would go to nobody really is worried about, am I going to have gas to fill the tank? You know, there's gas stations, there's many different options, and you can go and fill it up. So a person designs the car and designs manages the fleets and so on without necessarily accounting for that. But with electrification, you have to start thinking about it as a system. Because if things operate completely independently, you end up having to replace 70% of the transformers. And most likely, you're going to miss all the state targets. But instead, if you started thinking about the possibility of coordination between the infrastructure of the grid and the management of the transportation, you can start to match your supply and demand much, much better locally. And once that starts to happen, we have shown in a recent research paper that was published in Juul last year that you can basically go from replacing 70% of transformers to something like 30%, which is a dramatic change. Now, what are the challenges to make something like that happen? One piece is technology, as Marko said. You need much smarter kind of management of how you schedule your EVs and where they're going to go, where they're going to charge, and so on. You also need the infrastructure to be smarter, and able to communicate and respond and engage with your electric vehicles, with the chargers, and so on. That's one piece. The other piece is policy. Right now, kind of the financial incentives and the pricing schemes that we apply on the sector are not really supportive of this coordination. There is no real incentive to enable it. So you need to change that as well. And third, I also think there is a big need for these different sectors to really get together. The automotive OEMs, the charging suppliers, and the companies that build charging networks, the policymakers and decision makers, because we find that once you try to put all of these systems together, there has to be a kind of this conversation that goes along digitally through standards, but also an understanding between these different parties of how to enable that. And I think that fundamental observation for me is that unless we do this, we are not going to meet what we set ourselves up to do. And how do we meet this? One of the things that, from Stanford, we're just a university. We don't operate anything. And what we see as an opportunity for Stanford is to bring these players together to partner with other institutions, like UC Davis, who I do read papers and appreciate a lot of the work you guys do. So to create kind of this demilitarized zone where these conversations can happen, where we can identify which technologies need to be developed, where you can form kind of a consensus and try to accelerate and fix this problem. And right now, having traveled the US and even South America and Asia, all eyes are on California to try to understand, OK, how is this going to happen here? Because the same issue is there in every grid I've visited. And all the process that we've discussed here could be even worse when we talk about trucks. Typically, we talk about a personal mobility. But of course, freight transportation is a big contributor to emissions. And there are actually infrastructure gap problems that are even more severe. So I was curious if you could comment a little bit more on this aspect that sometimes is overlooked in the conversations. Yeah, I mean, so transportation as a whole is the California's largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. And for sure, passenger transport, personal vehicles is a very big chunk of that. But a really important part of that, although not the majority, is our movement of goods around the state. Now, California, I'll stay on the optimistic side for a couple of things. One is, thanks for some brilliant research from this part of the Bay Area and other parts of the state. And all over the world, batteries have made incredible progress, such incredible progress that a lot of people were not sure what kind of solutions that we had available to decarbonize trucking. Now, we have some pretty clear solutions. Really, lots of classes of freight trucks can be directly electrified. There may be some open questions about the very heaviest freight trucks, but the Tesla Semi is now on the road, and that's a class eight tractor trailer that can take goods 500 miles between charge. That's great, right? And what we now need to figure out is stuff that we have taken all of our personal transportation charging needs, and now we have to figure out how to scale that up by multiple scales and factors. The good news is California has two rules. The advanced clean truck rule and the advanced clean fleet rule, both of those are leading, eventually, the outcome is that manufacturers and sales of trucks in the state have to be completely zero emission, all 100% of sales by 2036, with some fairly slow ramp up in the early years and much faster ramp up of shares of sales of zero emission trucks in later years. To make sure that that target is hit, we have to couple that with good deployment of charging infrastructure and other forms of electricity generation if there's some level of hydrogen involvement here. Now, the reason this is a challenge and something that the state is paying attention to and really needs to step up on is for us to have enough chargers at the rate and speed that you can get for trucks to be a viable, practical alternative to diesel. And recently there's been some efforts across a variety of different universities that have joined together as well as standard setting agencies to come up with a charging standard called the megawatt charging standard, MCS. Now, once MCS is hopefully final, we at least won't have the sort of issues we've had on the passenger vehicle side of some kind of balkanization with Chattano taking off a little bit and then SAECCS combo coming in and now it looks like most people are migrating to Tesla's NAC standard. We should probably avoid that and that's the good news. Then the solution set is really about partnerships with utilities, this California's energy commission being able to spend some money on this, the federal incentives from the inflation reduction act and everything else in order to deploy the charging infrastructure that's needed to be able to make trucks a viable solution set to electrify. I'll just close on one point. I think zero emission standards should just be technology neutral and that's how California has gone forward with it. It is hard enough to directly electrify trucks because of the sort of power needs at the very end of pipe. If you start having efficiency penalties for the trucks on top of that with hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells, then you're sort of compounding your electricity power needs problems by factors of two or three, you need more power. So trying to go as much as possible for the sake of the climate where we can directly electrify in trucking is a very good idea and it still needs to meet the driver's expectations and use cases and that's why you need very fast charging and while this maybe seemed like a daunting problem, we actually had energy innovation, think there's a several set of different sets of opportunities to make that viable from a policy standpoint and we look to our brilliant university colleagues here to come up with all the technical requirements and the different entities that need to talk to each other and come up with the various communication standards and otherwise in order to make it real. Happy to have a conversation. So as I mentioned before, let me follow up on the topic that Susan mentioned about state legislation and the two follow up questions. The first one, if you could elaborate, be more about the timeline for these two pieces of legislation and second of all, if you could also comment what is done outside of California in terms of lessons learned and alignment of goals and initiatives. Well, the second part of that is pretty easy is that there's not a lot going on outside of California in the US, right? And so that's what's so exciting about being here doing this work is that California is, it's like a big experiment and we're here helping that along and helping to study it and learn from that so that we can pass along those lessons to other willing states but also to the national level. There's a lot to be learned from other parts of the world and so we look there as well. Yeah, so I guess rather than legislation, I'd like to talk a little bit more about kind of what's going on at the state level now which is that we've had these two policies about reducing vehicle miles of travel. The state has been putting a lot of money into transit and bicycle and pedestrian facilities, for example, some of it using the revenues from cap and trade. But at the same time as we have this goal of reducing how much people are driving, we are continuing to expand highways. So to me, this is one of the really big disconnects in California's transportation policy at the moment. All this effort to electrify, we have policy about reducing VMT but we're still expanding highways. We know, the research shows very conclusively that expanding highways induces additional driving and that's what the kerfuffle that I mentioned earlier is all about, is estimating what those effects are and then how would we mitigate that, which is really the state saying we're gonna keep widening highways and we're gonna take some of the money and put it into a few pedestrian projects and a little bit of transit and then that'll solve the problem but it's really not solving the problem. So that's something I think we've really gotta take on. And then I said our transportation problem is fundamentally a housing problem. It's also fundamentally a pricing problem in that we underpriced driving. If you factor in the direct cost of driving, our gas taxes don't pay for that. There's a lot of other money that gets used to help support our driving system. And then of course if you talk about the externalities of driving, even if it's electrified, we as drivers are not paying for that. We're not paying for that directly. And if we change the pricing system, that's really that's how we know we could better manage driving, reduce unnecessary driving, deal with the congestion problem and help to meet our GHG reduction goals. But again, that's a really politically unviable thing to talk about. Although MTC in the Bay Area had some listening sessions a couple months ago about the idea of full lane tolling, all lane tolling. So 101, 880 where there's good parallel transit service. Maybe what we need to do is make everybody pay to use that facility. And of course that brings up issues about equity, there are ways to address that if we do implement a pricing system. And I guess another really important point to throw out here is that all these efforts about reducing VMT are also really good for equity because we know that the most disadvantaged communities disproportionately feel the negative effects of our car oriented transportation system. And it's also the biggest financial burden for them. So we need to be finding other ways to move people around. We need to be giving people options other than just driving. So a quick follow up. So you mentioned all lane tolling and the associated equity concerns. We envision here sort of revenue refunding schemes or how would you make sure that people from the lower segment of the population wouldn't be unfairly impacted? Well, so a couple of ways you can address it. One is that if we told the freeways, that's gonna raise a whole lot of revenues that we can put into those alternatives. Like transit, like investing in transit the way it needs to be invested in. The other thing we can do is subsidize driving for lower income households who admittedly are often dependent on driving because the alternatives are just not good enough yet. So we've got this awkward situation where we're trying to get people to drive less but we don't really have these alternatives. So some people are gonna have to continue to drive. So we've got some experiments going on around the state with mobility wallets which work sort of like food stamp subsidies where lower income households can qualify for a certain amount of money per month to go towards transportation that they could use to pay for gas but also or instead to use for transit or bike sharing systems or the like. So that's a couple of ways that the equity concerns around pricing can be addressed. And going back more on the technological side so far we haven't talked about reliability yet which is one of the key concerns around electrification. So I was curious around, can you share a little bit about your thoughts on how we could address the reliability issues for alternative forms of energy sources for transportation? I think there is several challenges on that front. When you think about reliability, the idea is if I have to drive a certain number of miles every day, how many days of the year am I able to accomplish the task and not prevent it from doing it to some other issue? What are other issues? First, we are already seeing here in California various climate and related outages of the electricity grid. If the grid is not on and you have an electric vehicle, maybe you don't have a way to charge it. And so that's one reliability issue. The second is the reliability of the infrastructure itself. We discovered, for example, here on the Stanford campus, when we look at all our chargers, about 30 to 40% of our charging guns are never working at any given time. So there's 30% chance it will go and try to charge your car with one of the chargers in the garage here and it doesn't work. And once you have those issues, what are the kind of impacts you can have? Well, we had the chance to go and visit AC Transit and Jimmy Chan has coordinated a major project with them to assess different types of transportation decarbonization options for buses. And what they found was super, for me, was a big surprise, which is, well, if you just look at costs and everything, electric vehicle buses make absolute sense. It is definitely the most efficient from an energy standpoint, as Anna mentioned, and it's also simpler. But from a reliability standpoint, the day we visited there, they had 26 electric buses stranded for four months because they're not able to charge. And there's issues with the charger being compatible with the vehicle. Another issue was that PG&E that had guaranteed them grid allocation for installing a certain number of chargers said, well, that grid allocation was not available and it's gonna take another X amount of time. And meanwhile, the much more expensive solution of hydrogen was working. And so that led them to change their decarbonization plan from 70% of the vehicles being electric into 70% being hydrogen. So reliability can play a gigantic role on fleets, for example. And I think how do we achieve that level of reliability is again, this issue of systems thinking. A lot of what we have done now, I see as kind of the first generation of trying to electrify transportation. You built really good vehicles, then folks are really good at power electronics, built chargers, and then folks that are pretty good at deploying infrastructure went out there and did all of this. And things don't really work very well with each other. There were no standards and so on and nothing was really built imagining a scale of millions of vehicles that need to operate at 99.99% reliability, which is kind of the expectation. If you're AC transit, you're not gonna buy 30% more buses and 40% more chargers just to make sure things work. So I think as we try to scale up, we're gonna have to, on the technology side, start bringing in a lot more thinking around how reliability was incorporated into software and into computer systems. I think that's gonna play a role. There's a lot of techniques and ideas and people who know that that need to work in this area. Second, I think we have to have a serious conversation about grid interconnection and making that work. And I think there's a huge policy and economics issue. And third, I think all of this then plays into the equity side. Stanford research from several faculty here has shown that the grid is a lot less reliable in low income areas of the state. And if you look at that and you say, well, all those people, if they're gonna rely on electric transportation, they're gonna have a less reliable transportation service automatically, how is that even equitable? But I think there's a lot of hope if we focus on the right questions and the right goals. And I think it starts with, in my opinion, for this particular issue, we need data that is going through the system to be shared. We need standards even to say when is the charger working? There's no standard right now. We have legislation that says you need a certain amount of uptime. There was no definition of uptime. Now everyone is crambling to kind of go and define what is that. And of course, companies wanna define it in a way that it's good for them. But is that what us users of the transportation system think is the right metric for our experience? So for that, we need data. And that idea that data need to be shared to a certain extent, that for example, in HC Transit, they discover they need a data all the way from components of what is happening inside their vehicle to the charger, to the grid. And they are enforcing rules now that they only buy buses and equipment if you're willing to share that data. So, but those kind of practices need to be also shared among our community to think about. And one last bit that I wanted to bring about onto this discussion of VMT and economics is something that has been in my mind for a while and it's also related to equity. Not only the transportation system is changing, but the grid is also changing. If you look at the grid in California, 2040, there is massive amounts of solar that is curtailed. This is essentially power that we would pay you to consume. Then it makes me think, well, if I'm driving a vehicle that is using that energy, I'm actually generating a positive externality from an energy standpoint. Obviously, as Susan said, the space for the highways and the lanes are gonna be an issue. But if I look at 2040, what the energy sources tell me is that actually, well, if your car can absorb that power, it should drive more. You should use more energy because it's being thrown away. And it's also an opportunity to address equity issues because of all of that power that's thrown away if it could be stored and utilized and it could potentially create another revenue stream or mechanisms for cheap transportation. But I think unless we take a look at a system's viewpoint in all of this, we are not gonna be able to scale. This is a big, big issue right now. And I see it at the CC level discussions and I also see it at the academic level because typically in very few places, maybe Davis and Berkeley, there's kind of some integration between decarbonization of transportation and people who actually look at transportation as design and roadways and tolls and all of that. But generally, these are two independent conversations that happen. And governed by different agencies. Governed by different agencies. And they never had to talk to each other. I mean, this is a completely new thing. So we discussed a lot about electrification, incentivizing behavioral changes toward reducing emissions. I was wondering, Anand, if you could comment a bit more broadly about policies and technologies that we could envision toward the goal of reducing emissions from transportation. Yeah, thanks, Marco. So one of my side jobs is being on the board of the International Council on Clean Transportation. That's another sister think tank, kind of like energy innovation who work exclusively on finding solutions on how to reduce emissions from transportation. And they work all over the world and they've tried several different approaches on what works best and what doesn't work when it comes to rapidly reducing emissions from transportation. And here we're referring primarily, no, almost entirely to greenhouse gases and other related air pollutants from tailpipes. And I'll have a little bit of a story for you which is the general narrative is that we owe a lot to the innovation of Tesla for the rate at which the electric vehicle transition has picked up in the US and then subsequently globally. And at the surface level, that is true. We do owe quite a lot to an innovative, upstart disruptive company that challenges incumbents. If you look under the frunk, the EV hood, I guess, there's more to this story. The success of Tesla through the entire teens, 2010, all the way to 2020 was the revenue from being a leader in innovating and selling electric vehicles due to the California original ZEV mandate that was put in place by the Air Resources Board by Chair Mary Nichols. And I know current Chair Leanne Randolph was here today, but we and Assemblywoman Fran Pavley's bill was the one that led to that ZEV mandate in 2012. Quarter after quarter, all the way through that decade, the revenue from innovating and selling more electric vehicles than is necessary to meet the California ZEV mandate, selling those credits to laggards, car companies who thought EVs would amount to nothing, help flip Tesla from loss to profitability and kept the company going before it became entirely more profitable in 2020 and after. So over and over, the lesson is very clear. In China, the electric vehicle sales share today is something like 35%. How did that happen? It happened because China took some of the lessons from California ZEV mandate and put in their own called the New Energy Vehicle Program. Regulations are generally viewed in the United States as something that is innovation inhibiting, requiring people to do something. But when regulation is cleverly designed and it impinges on the people who have the greatest agency to take action, like automakers, who know how to make electric vehicles, just didn't have the right motivation to make enough of them and spend their billions in advertising dollars to sell them, it can be innovation enhancing. And in transportation, regulations for requiring either reductions of tailpipe emissions like we have pending right now in the US EPA or California's requirement for sales of zero emission vehicle shares each year or boats, which California also has tailpipe emissions requirements combined can unleash and accelerate an energy transition and a transportation electrification transition that we need to happen faster than anything else in the history of transitions for us to meet climate goals. We did not need to require anything in order for internal combustion engines to take over from horse carriages. But that took 40 years with plenty of pushback from the horse carriage companies. And we can't afford that luxury for climate. We have a physical problem that we're trying to meet. And in that sense, there is a little bit of an urgency but the requirement and the salience of policy like we pioneered in California, taken up by China and then taken up by the European Union is absolutely critical and will continue to be critical even if we hit 30 plus percent shares of electric vehicles. And I'll also point out that we also agree that if you just rely on vehicle electrification, you do nothing else, you're still, you're gonna be hard pressed to meet 1.5 degrees C or any other such climate target. So everything, it's an and solution, looking at VMG reduction or in the sense, enhancing people's ways of getting around and making their commute. Everything except highway building. Right, instead of adding more roads, you will, all of those are needed in order for that transition. And California is a pioneer in that and lots of other regions have taken it up. And the US EPA is under the Biden administration really stepping up, but we'll see how it goes. There's still a lot more to be done with the same kind of policy instruments with trucks. Thank you, and I learned a lot for sure. We have time for about 10, 15 minutes of a Q and A, so I would like to open a discussion to the audience and then we're going to pass it on the mic. So please wait for the mic before asking questions. So we have a first question over there and then a second one over there. Yeah, hi, thank you. My name is Michelle Lena. I'm with the Public Advocates Office, part of the PUC. My question is stems from a workshop I attended where several utilities at an Epic workshop were talking about the difficulty of integrating electric vehicles on a service territory wide scale into the grid, especially through, you know, sort of vehicle grid integration technologies. They were saying that customers voice privacy and security concerns around allowing utilities essentially have access to what they see as personal data. So I just wondered if any of you could speak to ways to sort of get past that hurdle because you were talking about the need for, you know, software and everything. And if there's a customer side inhibition to doing so that could be a huge roadblock. Thanks. Yeah, I think there's been many architectures for coordinating systems that have been demonstrated that don't require you to own the customer control nor know what he's doing. And in fact, even here at Stanford, we have a project that demonstrated that, but it's not a unique project. So this is kind of, I wouldn't say it's a solve problem for EV charging, but there is lots of technologies that can be immediately applied and would essentially be a solve issue. I think the bigger question here is that for utilities right now, they make their money by rate-basing infrastructure investments. And when you set yourself up to that, what is the benefit for me to coordinate anything and prevent any infrastructure upgrade? There isn't really any benefit to that. But if you really wanna align everybody, it's not about thinking, oh, this guy is an enemy, that guy is this. I think the advocate should be towards, okay, let's reward a utility or whoever is involved in preventing the transformer upgrade. Be it through software, be it through other mechanisms, because once you are rewarding that, then everybody will align and follow that rule. I think this is a biggest issue. I think Susan mentioned pricing. I think this is really the issue here is, how do you reward everyone for enabling coordination between consumers and the grid? And this is an issue definitely for EV charging, but also for all sorts of electrification, I think. It was a question over there. Thank you. Sam Madsen with Eddie Energy. Actually, it was kind of had a similar question I was just asked, but just I've seen various studies around the readiness or lack of the distribution grid for very high V situations, particularly when you think about electric, kind of long haul or medium haul trucks and all those getting charged in warehouse districts that the load is incredible. So I mean, I guess from an infrastructure and or kind of let's coordinate better with our existing infrastructure, how ready or not, what's the scale of the distribution upgrades we need for over the next couple of decades for a sort of very high EV future? Yeah, I can take a shot of that. I guess just to put things in context, it is true that if you want a service load from the deepest levels of electrification we need to see, just I mean, I'll complicate things first, then I'll try to make it simple, but we've got not just electric vehicles and passenger and trucks, but ideally what you wanna do also in various different industrial districts is industrial heat processes also need to get electrified. So foresight and planning for where you already have existing processes that are amenable to electrification and having sort of utility planning in order to do that. The PUC can ask utilities to do that, but there can be other agencies in the state that can pass policies to ask them to plan for that. If that happens, the rule of thumb in order for California by 2040, like over the next decade or so, there needs to be the distribution system upgrade in investments need to be I think a factor of eight higher or something like that than they are currently. That's a rule of thumb, right? So that's significant, obviously it's not happening fast enough, but what people are not recognizing is when you start looking at industry and finding solutions for industry, electricity plays a major role there and the alternatives are not that great and so therefore being able to also plan for that will mean that you can do a very good job of like preparing the state for a carbon neutrality goal by 2045. So it's a big gap, there is poor planning at the moment and there needs to be possibly legislative policy at least to address it. So a lot of questions, I think we have a question here in the front. Hi, Chris King with Siemens. First a quick comment, we've all heard about the frog in the boiling water and the water is starting to boil as electricity rates at 45 cents, which is equivalent to 450 gallon of gas, which obviously has huge implications for transportation electrification. My question though is around VGI and there's kind of two big flavors of that, there's V to V, B slash V to H and then B to G and I guess our thesis is that the first one is going to deploy much more quickly and more easily because you don't have to involve the utility, you don't have to change any policies and you don't have that technical interconnection that you have to make. So I was wondering if you guys could comment on your outlook for VGI. Yeah, this is a great question. I think one of the, so the technology has been demonstrated, experimented with and what are the challenges right now? The first one is there is a, still a lack of understanding of what is the impact on the battery system of the vehicle and this information is owned by the OEM. Not even the battery, we talked to various battery manufacturers here as part of the StorageX program and what we learned is even for them, they don't have access to that data and that's an essential part of the calculus of how much is it worth for me to discharge a battery to the grid instead of for driving a mile. The second issue is the requirement of the type of chargers. Right now you're seeing people adopting what's available out there in the market and once you fit your home with the charger, going and refitting it with another charger becomes a big expense. And third, and I would say this is also a major issue in all of this conversation, I learned through my own experience of installing and electric things at home and also talking to developers, there is a dirt of electricians in the state of California and if we try to accelerate and there is no amount of AI data policy that's gonna go and connect wires and dig trenches and do the projects for you and this is still a big, big issue and when you think about V to G, what I learned from these installers that install this technology is that electricians are very, very worried because they are unfamiliar with this technology. There's a huge education component and I think we are missing that sorely and if there was somebody from the civil engineering department here like Martin Fischer, he would say all the trade unions and so on have been saying and advocating that look, unless all your plans for investing in technology and so on also invest on educating the trades, you're gonna run into this issue and especially for, it was very interesting, they really, the VGI is a big issue because once the electricity flows the other way and can go into the panel, that electricians responsibility now has to, he has to do all kinds of calculations he's not familiar with and that will prevent you from installing this charger. So, but do we need VGI? I think we have seen enough studies that it will be great if it's there but even if it's not there, we can do the job that we need to do and I think as Anand said, it's really about getting our act together and seeing what is the minimum viable thing that we need to do putting some policy and incentives in place and making people align. I think we are not very good at that right now. We have time for one last question, maybe back there, an apologies for cutting it short but hopefully the panelists will be available afterwards for answering any remaining questions. Can you, sorry, Daniel Ray from Nostera Ventures, can you comment on any thoughts of policies around working remote to reduce congestion, reduce driving? Is it fair to incentivize companies to allow their employees? It seems like there is a big effect on housing, there's a big effect on commercial real estate, et cetera. I'm sure that Susan has quite a few thoughts about it. Yeah, I've looked at this literature very recently and it's a little murky because it turns out when you stay home rather than commuting to work, it doesn't mean you're not driving somewhere. So, evidence suggests that it's kind of a wash. It seems obvious if people stayed home, there'd be less driving, but maybe not, maybe not. So it's just different times of the day? Different times of the day. I mean, think about what's happened since COVID. I mean, there's traffic kind of all day long. It's not just peak hours anymore because well, sometimes people are commuting at different hours than they used to but also because of the non-work travel. Commute travel is 25% of all of our travel. So yeah, we were hopeful. And as long as I've got the mic, I'm gonna throw out two more words that really should be mentioned here. One is pavements, big issue and greenhouse gas emissions and we have a pavement research center that's working on all that. And then safety, another really important thing to think about. And then you said something about, Stanford doesn't operate anything. Oh, we do operate our bus system. You do operate things. So I thought one more idea. I meant it doesn't operate anything in the grid. Yeah, no, no, no. But I did wanna throw out that universities can be a test bed for all kinds of... And we are. And we have a project. And Marco and myself and a couple of others have a project called 24-7 Carbon-Free Transportation where we try to schedule the bus system and the charging so that it is using the least amount of carbon and also preventing, so that you can also use it during outages and so on. That note, I know that we could continue talking about these topics for a while, but I had to wrap it up. Thank you everyone for attending this session. Launch is served in Mecca Hall. So I'll see you there. And thank you for the panelists. Thank you. Thank you.