 This is the session on electric vehicle charging stations for corporations. I'm really excited about this event. I have three distinguished panelists here, and we're really hoping to have a dialogue about some of the challenges, some of the solutions that each of their organizations are working through as they implement their workplace charging programs at their companies. So just quickly, my name is Josh Boone. I'm the senior manager at the California Plug-In Electric Vehicle Collaborative. I'm not going to speak long, so don't worry. We'll move quickly to the panelists. We are a public-private partnership based in Sacramento, California, with the sole goal of trying to bring more plug-in electric vehicles to the state of California and to our roadway. So just quickly, I want to pause and find out from the audience how many of you drove a plug-in electric vehicle to this summit today? I think we have three and one on the panel, so hopefully that will continue to improve. The next question I want to ask you, which really sets the context for this panel, is how many of you drive your plug-in electric vehicles to work, and if you do, does your workplace or organization offer workplace charging? Because that's really the focus of this session. So we've got two, and we've got three on stage for sure. Great. Well, hopefully that continues to expand. Just quickly, the collaborative membership, as you can see, is made up of a wide variety of stakeholder groups from the California state energy agencies to most of the automakers, local government, the key utilities, and of course the environmental and educational NGOs and the network providers. So our goal is to bring these different sectors together around a common table to kind of collaborate, convene, and communicate on issues related to bringing more plug-in electric vehicles to market. Our organization last year, during our strategic planning meeting, determined that one of the things that we wanted to focus on for 2013 is infrastructure, charging infrastructure, and specifically charging infrastructure at workplaces and around multi-unit dwellings. So that kind of brings us to this topic today. Just quickly, the collaborative has a series of workplace charging initiatives that I want to bring to your attention. We have a technical working group that is doing a series of surveys of companies around the state to try to document what their best practices are in this workplace charging space and work together to look for solutions. We're also working on a series of decision-making guides. So these would be guides that would help employers, employees, figure out how to go about doing this whole workplace charging thing. We are in partnership with CalSTART. They have an EV employer initiative and they're developing a workplace charging best practices guide. And I'm under the impression that they're in the final stages of finishing that document. So if there are company representatives in the room that are interested in this space but aren't quite sure, you know, kind of some of the best practices, stay tuned, that will be coming soon. The other thing I'm excited to announce is one of our signature events this year is called Drive the Dream. That's there in bold. This is a Department of Energy funded effort to encourage workplace charging around the state of California. So we're along with the governor hosting this event. We are looking to California CEOs to come and make specific commitments around workplace charging, buying plug-in electric vehicles for their companies, their fleets, or some kind of incentive program to really kind of ramp up or amp up PEVs in the state. So if that's something that interests you, please come see me. And last but not least, the U.S. DOE's workplace charging challenge is something that many of the Silicon Valley companies are involved with. But basically, companies make pledges to put in workplace charging or scale up the workplace charging program that they have. And we at the collaborative are, since we're a public-private partnership, we're an ambassador for this program. Just quickly, the DOE workplace charging challenge launched in January of this year. And to date they have 48 partners. So I know that a few of the panelists here on the stage are part of that program. So that's really exciting. So quickly, I want to just introduce my panelists here. And then we'll have a little moderated Q&A. And then we'll save some time at the end for questions. So here, close to me, is Jessica Herrera from Facebook. And next to her is Claudia Rhodes from Juniper Networks. And Brian Glaisbrook from NetApp. So thank you all for being here. So why don't we start off with you, Jessica, and just we'll walk down the line here. Just kind of give an overview of, I don't think Facebook needs a lot of description in terms of what you do. But just kind of a quick company profile. We'll go down the line, and then we'll come back and drill into your workplace charging program. And I've got your slide up. So great. So we have basically Facebook, his mission is to make the world more open and connected. We have 4,900 employees worldwide in 24 countries and 48 cities around the world. At headquarters, we have about 3,200 employees right now. And we are in nine buildings that has about a million square feet. And 3,100, almost 3,200 parking spaces. However, we are growing and actually have the capability of upping the headcount at our headquarters to double what we are today to 6,600 with about 3,200 parking spaces. So I'm Claudia with Juniper Networks. Our company is also based in Sunnyvale. And we have about 3,500 employees right now on about 1.3 million square feet. We just opened a new campus that we own in Sunnyvale. So we're split 50-50. So a lot of what I'll be talking about today is focused on the new campus. I don't know if you guys know Juniper Networks. I guess you tell a little bit about our company, right? So we're a networking company. Our motto is to connect everyone everywhere. And we try to do that using Network. So we're going to be talking a little bit about today about how we developed our charging station program. We have about 3,500 parking spaces, I believe, on the property. So we do have a one-to-one ratio with our employees right now. But with the amount of electric vehicles coming on board, we're happy to shift that over to charging stations, which we'll talk about. Great. Hi, I'm Brian Glazerick with NetApp and the Global Sustainability Manager. NetApp is based in Sunnyvale. It's a B2B company. Unless you probably don't know what if you're not going to go to the store and buy a NetApp appliance. But we sell storage software and data management storage devices for data centers, enterprise storage, et cetera. In Sunnyvale is our headquarters campus. We've got about 4,000 employees, 13 buildings with about 1.65 million square feet. We just started the EV charging this year. And it's taken a little bit of a while. We can talk to how we got to that point. But it was definitely employee-driven. And that's one of the part of the reputation of NetApp is being a great place to work. I think we're ranked sixth this year. And this is sort of an aspect of being a great place to work is providing the service to our employees in amenity. That's great. Well, let's move right into the questions I have for you. Let's dive into your workplace charging specific programs. And why don't you tell us a little bit about, can you give us an overview of the number of employees that are driving PEVs and are charging an overview of the number of stations? And then we'll go from there into what your decision-making process was and your motivations and drivers for putting in workplace charging. So let's just start with Jessica. I'm going to put up this summary slide here, which will leave up for the duration of the session. Yes. So currently we have 12 level one chargers, 25 level two chargers, and one DC fast charger. We are looking to add another 11 chargers in the near future that will be dual chargers. We have about 133 registered EV users and about 75 use the plugins on a regular basis. We probably have about 50 or so 50 56 parking spots for the current fleet that we have now or the current charging stations we have now and provide multiple parking spaces for each charging station. And I'll go a little bit more into why later. But some of the decisions on why we provide that is because we definitely want to provide sustainable transportation solutions for our employees across the board. And EV is definitely a piece of that. It is also a benefit. You know, it is also a recruiting and retention. We probably have about a third of our employees that live in San Francisco. San Francisco, there isn't quite a lot of places to charge. And so a lot of our employees rely on the charging stations at work to get their charge. That's great. So for Juniper, we started with level one. So if you're not familiar with what level ones are, level ones is just a typical 110 household outlet. Level two is your 240. So it's a little bit better. It charges a little bit faster. And so most of the charging stations that are out there will actually be level twos is what we're seeing right now. So we started about four or five years ago. We had maybe four level one outlets and just regular 20 amps. And nobody was really using them. And then last year, you know, breaker tripped. I went out, flip the switch. Okay, next day breaker tripped. So it went out to see what was going on. People actually started bringing their electric vehicles in and they thought they could plug into both outlets at the same time. What we discovered is whoever installed those originally put 120 amp with two outlets on it. And that obviously doesn't work very well. So at that point about, that was about a year ago, I upgraded those to level twos. We put in the right type of infrastructure. And that was also the same time we were starting to develop our new campus across the street from those properties. And so I worked with the construction team. We decided how many we needed to put in the type of infrastructure and where they were going to be located. Part of developing this program for electric vehicles, charging stations is twofold. One, you have to decide whether you're really going to invest in it or not. You can't just dip your toe into it. If you don't have enough stations, you're going to have more problems. And it's better to take them out. So you either you have to go full force and do it or decide not to do it. So our decision was to move forward with it. It was really ramping up just this last year in January, February. It just was it exploded. I believe that Nissan came out with a new leasing option. And I had in within 45 to 60 days, at least another 50 employees who asked to use the stations. So we only had four back in December. And with the plan that we were just going to install the rest of them in the garage when it opened this past June. And so the last few months has been really tough until we open the garage with the additional stations. But part of managing whole program is understanding how many of your employees actually use them. So I have out of the 3,500 employees in Sunnyvale, I have 80 registered today, 81 registered today. But we I get about two requests a week to be added to those stations. So we are like Facebook looking to add 12 more stations before the end of the summer. And then I've also provided our construction team a full program on what days we need to be adding how many charging stations to keep up with our headcount and the demand. So I'm the beneficiary of this sort of development at NetApp. I've only been there a year and this has been thought about for a little while and just kind of took a little while in terms of budgeting and approvals and all that to get going for level two charters. On campus we've got these vehicles that the maintenance staff uses that are plug-in and they were using the level one charters. We have about 12 now on campus that actually are being used by that group. But as the really the roll out of EV chargers, especially the level two on campus is really driven by the employees. And so a couple years ago there were about two, a survey was done prior to when I joined the company but there were about two people, two, three that actually had any vehicle. And there were about 15 or 20 or so I think that wanted to have one or were thinking about having one and said they'd buy it if they came to camp. That had, we'd sent out another survey about a year ago when we were rolling out this plan to implement the level two and that number of owners leaped up to in the 30s and 40s range and up into the hundreds for people who'd like to. Now you obviously have to discount that a little bit, what people want to do versus what they're going to do. But that made it very clear that the level one of the plugs essentially in the garage that we are already seeing were problems because the EV owners were crowding out the actual maintenance guys in their vehicles because they even if the space was dedicated to maintenance or to facilities that people would still park there and plug their car in. So we realized it was going to be a challenge and the data in a survey confirmed that. And so the budget had been in there and eventually got approved. So we were able to put in all these equipment and put them all in at once in April of this year. And we had the equipment early in the year and we took time through that, we didn't just, as soon as we got it implemented, I mean it takes a little time to get the electricity and all that. But we made sure to have a process in place for how to deal with issues of the employee using the chargers before we actually had everything sort of a go live date in early April. So that's great. I know you each touched on this a little bit but one of the questions I get asked in our survey work is what was the real kind of top two drivers for companies to install workplace charging? I mean did you get out ahead of the curve and see that this was going to be something that you could use to your advantage in terms of recruiting employees as you or retaining them as you mentioned Jessica or was it really driven by the demand of your employees saying hey you know I have an electric car or I would like to get an electric car is this something you're going to offer me at work to extend my emails or allow me to charge because I live in a condo and don't have charging. So I'd like to hear a little bit more about that I think the audience would as well. So maybe Jessica you can start and breathe a little life into that. Yeah I think it's a combination of the two. I think initially we thought we saw that this was coming as a trend but the amount that we were putting in I mean that's really tough to gauge and so we surveyed and polled our employees but really just seeing the usage and same thing probably at least one to two folks every week that want to come in and become part of the network to start charging. And you know we've got high-tech employees and they're very early adopters and so trying to keep up with the demand is you know is a challenge but I think you know we try our best to kind of get a hold on that and put in additional infrastructure before even getting all of the charging when we do do work like that so that it's ready to go once and it's less trenching later down the line. Great. Yeah very similar to with us like I said before it started out as well we figured it's coming nobody expected it to come this fast and so now it's more of a demand so we've hustled really quickly to try to figure out where we are today where we need to be in a year or two years so that we can plan out how many to install and similar to you we've already put the infrastructure in so we know exactly what we're going to do in each garage as we start building on the campus what we need at the existing buildings so we have the infrastructure ready to go it's just you know basically pulling the trigger to say go ahead and do it so and some of these charging station companies there's a lot out there their new technology is coming out all the time so you know if you're considering it take a look at what they have today but maybe what they're looking at in six months it's changing you know every few months because all the technology that they're able to put into these charging stations even solar power you know well sorry we'll get there but even solar power charging stations is out there right I mean they're expensive but there's a lot of different options out there so I think for the most part it's trying to meet the demand today and then plan for the immediate future because it's growing very rapidly so if you have an answer please well no I was gonna say that so we have every week and then we have a new hire orientation in the beginning and one of the stories I gave is how we got to this point and talk about employees being engaged and and and I'd like to thank Tesla is anybody from Tesla here? Tesla Motors for okay thank you for creating this incredible rush of sarcastically creating this incredible rush of demand for not everybody can afford a Tesla but it seemed for some reason to have triggered an interest in things like the volt and the leaf and and we get between two and sometimes five requests through our process to get access to our system every week you know we have about 95 registered users now our utilization is about 75 percent for all of our 31 stations that we have on our campus but you know part of it is the competitive aspect and we're not going to give away free food like Facebook or Google but this is an opportunity to meet a demand from our employees and included you know a number of executives which obviously have a little bit of leverage so so let's talk a little bit about the benefit piece you know some organizations I think Facebook and others provide workplace charging for free others charge either nominal fee or they're charging by hour by kilowatt hour so can you tell me a little bit about and this gets I think into the management discussion because as you scale up your charging system and you have more cars you know how do you manage the new demand and are you managing it through price signals maybe you can take that one Brian sure well I mean unlike actually a lot of companies we actually the employees are charged for the electricity they're using too so they have we've created a process where they have to go through number of steps and sign a waiver and get a placard and the number of things and and register with the service for using which is charge point and and get access to our stations and then we they get charged there's a service fee and and basically a 14 cents a kilowatt hour rate an average of our utility rate across the campus and you know we kind of discussion went from you know should be free to should we try and charge back the you know the cost of all the infrastructure equipment and I think we were trying to try the line between you're trying to generate revenue which didn't go with this whole great place word comp set for us to you know the the whole free part also would have been a challenge because that for us it was showing you know we didn't want to show preferential treatment to one group or another not everyone can afford a once an electric car and we weren't about to install you know a gas station on our campus or a natural gas charging station so we you know this that was our kind of the how we how we tread the middle and it's actually helped I actually helped I think like I said 75 percent utilization rate I think people don't if they don't need to charge they don't charge and that's a good way to maintain sort of create avoiding fist fights and other things that we do and you know we've also put two parking spots per one charger so that once somebody's done after four hours the other person next door can can plug in so we essentially have spaces for 60 plus cars so those two parking spots per charger there's just one charge there's just one charge so someone can pull in and essentially get in queue right and is there a price signal change or is it just a flat fee it's a it's an it's an hourly rate you know plus there's like I said there's a fee in there and we're going to revisit the what the rate would be every year depending on what we're going to be paying for electricity so I think the ballpark is for four hour charge it's you know if you add in the chart the fee it's about you know two and a half to three dollars you know a charge thank you and Jessica can you maybe speak to Facebook I think you offer workplace charging for free as a benefit to your employees how you are managing that I know you mentioned earlier through your unique platform so talk a little bit about that and how you've organized internally yes so it is free for our employees as a benefit and we do use a Facebook platform which has worked very well for us and so everybody's part of a group for EV owners on site and folks because it's free can just leave their their plug open and so when somebody comes in it's all networked so when somebody comes into charge and they're charging they get an alert for when it's or they can go in to see when it's they don't get an alert but they're working on that so I'll touch on that a little bit but they can go in and see when it's completely charged and then can go down and unplug and plug in to somebody else's for them because it is free and it doesn't matter you know it's free to everybody so and then one of the other things that I've noticed too is on the platform that you know we put our best practices and that kind of information on that platform but in addition to that people if somebody's port is closed we'll message out and say hey you know I unplugged it's free but I noticed your port was closed so if you want to go down and charge so it's it's very social it's very easy they kind of work it up work it out amongst themselves but as the as the parking lot gets full it may become a bigger challenge so that's why I think dual charging stations will will be beneficial for us but as I mentioned they are looking to hack the system in some way so that's that it will give alerts to folks when they when they're done so great do you want to speak to the model you're using at Juniper sure so it does come down to managing the program so you can't just put a station in and just leave it if you decide to do that you actually have to have some sort of a program surrounding that industry standard is three to one ratio three drivers teach station or two drivers teach station so that's what I think as we talked before most of us are at that we're Juniper's a little behind but we'll be caught up soon but we do not charge at this point what we are in the midst of reviewing all of our stats so we can decide how much to charge what we've done very similar to Facebook is we got lucky the employees with only four stations for about four or five months ended up creating their own group within our company so it's the EV group and they all talk to each other and they tell each other they email each other or text each other I'm leaving now there's a space available who wants it and they all talk to each other that's great so I got into that group and I started owning that group now I also asked instead of dealing with 81 or 100 EV owners I asked for three volunteers to represent the entire group and so now we have an EV council and this is where we actually talk about how Juniper can help these EV drivers how our program can be better defined to meet their needs so one of the things we actually talked about is fee schedules and we had a great open conversation a couple weeks ago about this and it seems like the consensus out there is maybe two so the average charging by the way is about three and a half hours for each session at our particular property so the idea is maybe we charge those are two different ideas either charge free no charge for two or three hours and then incrementally start charging start charging a fee the other option is to charge a fee during inactive charging only and what that does it will be an incentive for people to move their vehicles so the whole idea of having charge of having stations out there and we have duals so all of ours are duals is that you're supposed to share I know we all learned and we were children do you have to share I find these engineers sometimes don't like to share all the time or you know they get caught in meetings and don't want to go down and move their vehicles so as an incentive and this actually came from the EV group owners they actually asked if we could not charge during active charging but once the vehicle stopped charging but it's still plugged in could we then go ahead and charge a fee whether it's five, ten dollars they were willing to do that to incentivize the owner to move his vehicle and get out and go to another space so somebody else could come in and charge so we're in that midst right now so it looks like we'll probably start charging somewhere in August first we just haven't figured out what that fee schedule will be yet but there's a lot of different fee schedules out there great one of the things that our organization is learning again through our survey process is that some organizations that are trying to manage their workplace charging are wrestling with how to treat different plug-in electric vehicle technology types so of course we have the full battery electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf that run off of their the energy from the battery and then we have the vehicles like the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and so in some cases we're learning that you know they're trying to figure out if they should be giving preferential treatment to one technology type or another and I'm wondering if that's coming up as you manage your programs and how you're mitigating that as far as the type of plug that the vehicles have well just the vehicle type so for example they're all a standard plug no no I just mean in terms of like a Nissan Leaf driver may come to work and say look I get access to the charging station because it's essential for me to make my next trip to charge you know I need to charge be able to make my next trip a Chevy Volt owner you know may not need to have that charge and so I know there's a couple of organizations in Los Angeles that are really struggling with that and how to kind of work through that so I'm curious how you got if that's been an issue if it's been a non-issue or if you're mitigating that through any kind of creative solutions no should we attack the Tesla person no no no I wouldn't say no I mean I would say for us we did have some Leaf owners that were making comments and when we had a sort of town hall on this new thing I'm you know I have a Leaf I live in you know Marin or something and I'm driving down and you know I'm dead and part of that as well you know I hate to say it it's it's there it was their consciousness to live so far away and have a car that gets you know has a short mileage range but the other advantage for us at least in terms of charging is that I see so many so many I mean I see a number of like Tesla owners for example who won't be parking the EV spaces because they don't need to and so that's why you know our utilization rates at 75 percent which you know is okay because it allows us to you know deal with growth in these vehicles but also you know I think inherently it's we've again we've kind of outsourced the management or the social management to the very active EV group which has a distribution list similar to what you you're saying and I'm not on that because apparently that's this massive flow of traffic right to fill up your inbox and you know 10 minutes but they're very engaged and they kind of work around themselves so the advantage of having that extra sort of buffer if you will of spaces and the people with the vehicles they don't need it realizing they don't not parking there I think it's been helpful okay that's great how's Facebook handling that if at all currently we don't have that issue but I think probably at this point I wouldn't foresee us giving preferential treatment I think it's more of a they'll self-manage you know like I said they're very willing to unplug and plug someone else in and so I mean I guess if that becomes an issue later down the line we'll definitely visit that but I don't foresee that being an issue and we'll probably add it to the best practices if it does become an issue we don't have that issue either but I agree I don't think we would be giving preferential treatment so what you know Brian said is it depends on how far people are coming Tesla's you know their technology is strong enough that they don't necessarily have to charge when they come down I don't know most vehicles now I think for Tesla's go over 200 miles on a full charge so I don't know how many people live 200 miles away from the job but so they really don't need to be charging I do find them in our spaces but you know the EV owners the other groups will actually leave notes on everybody's car that says hey you know you shouldn't park here you don't need to charge or they'll send emails to people a lot telling them that too so it's okay that they have those conversations we have had no fights but it's good that they're they're working it they are working it out themselves and they're talking to each other about it it's our responsibility just to make sure that you know we're providing it and managing the stations that does meet their demands great so I know you've touched briefly on the scalability of your workplace charging program and I know that several of you mentioned that you have plans to scale that up but what what was your kind of design process as you thought through kind of the the initial installation and maybe as you think about kind of taking steps to add chargers and and I know at least one of one of your companies has a DC fast charge I'm curious the utilization rate of that and how how you're managing that so for us you know it is always a challenge you know we did the same thing we added a few we retrofitted a couple that were already on the campus and then we did surveys but you know obviously you're not going to get a hundred percent response rate on your survey so it's only a little fragment and so we learned early on I mean we phased in probably three now soon to be four phases of installations and we learned early on to just add in the infrastructure early on so that when the need does come up you know we just the infrastructure is already in place and then we have a new campus that we're building across the street and we're going to put at least the same level of like percentage of chargers that we have now but also add in infrastructure should be needed in the future and we do have a DC charger that actually came it was part of a requirement for a grant that we got on from the department of energy for some of our other charging stations that we received it's not as highly utilized but I think that's because that one actually does charge that's the one charger that that it has a fee associated with it you know it is used but not as often as the other so that one's a one-time flat five dollars per session for use what about scalability on your program so yeah you know similar again it was a demand thing so what we do is I'm tracking I've built a program already so I'm tracking headcount so I work at the planning department and figure out where our headcount's going to be each year so because charging stations really need to be based on your employee headcount and not maybe number of parking spaces or square footage it's really based on how many employees you actually have industry standard out there says anywhere from three to five percent of your employee base will be driving electric vehicles and that's today I mean that could go up in the next couple of years as technology gets better so based on our headcount we have figured out if our headcount doesn't change I still need 140 charging stations to be able to accommodate everybody that will eventually be signing up for that so we just have it scaled out on when our headcount is supposed to increase and that's when we do it however as we are building our new campus now we have infrastructure that's already been putting in place so the first garage that we built now we only opened 13 charging stations day one but we had the infrastructure in there for a total of 25 stations so I'm just bringing them on you know little by little as we need them instead of giving too many if you give too many up front people then start to feel I can just park there all day and I never have to move and it's harder to break them of that habit than it is to keep them sharing Yeah we have plans obviously to expand depending on you know what the need is I mean like I said we have about a 75% utilization rate it actually went down when we started it was higher and it's gone down but part of that is because of they're more drivers right so we'll have to evaluate and determine whether that how that how that changes over time and if it starts to get you know kind of near the top then we make then we're going to figure out our schedule for for the budget for implementing more stations I mean the the the challenges that I think this first go around and putting in these 31 you know in discussions I have people who said this was sort of the easy those are the easy locations and you've taken care of those around all of our different buildings then it comes a little more complicated and you have to take up parking spaces from other spots and so it comes more of a challenge and so having good I think having good data and figuring out you know what are we going to really need you know we are you know getting close to that three to five percent range so we'll help determine you know when we we invest and do the additional installations that's a good point is is location I know we'll probably talk about that a little bit but how you structure your stations and where you put them from a facilities perspective as close to the building as possible is really the best because it's less cost for infrastructure but a lot of these owners I'm here in there telling me I don't care where you put them put them in the very back of the parking lot we'll walk but you know it's more expensive to get infrastructure out there so again if you know you have an opportunity to look at where your infrastructure is and also place them so as you have parking spaces not against a wall but in the center of a two rows of parking spaces so you can you can have dual chargers all the way down and maybe have four spots per dual charger so four cars can park there and they just you know plug in and plug out so they physically don't have to move their their vehicle so that's another you know thing to think about well I mean I just to add something along the same line is that you know the installations we did were we have about you know 13 buildings on campus and their number of different locations but I would we didn't survey where all the EV drivers were but I don't think they mapped where they were so I'm sure there are people that are walking you know significant distance from another building to where their building is but you know I haven't maybe there's grumblings I haven't heard any real complaints about that so that actually doing that too also makes a little bit easier for the willing to deal with that sort of distance then it's easier to they just want it push it farther out right here so let's let's talk a little bit about everybody wants to know kind of the biggest challenges that you face and doing this and oftentimes cost comes up so can you talk a little bit about how you're doing your rate of return calculations if that's a big factor in it if the program has to kind of pay for itself or if you're factoring in other social benefits that kind of offset the monetary value so maybe I can start with Claudia sure yes there's a lot of costs associated with it so it depends what you what you put in so you can do the least expensive route which is just putting in outlets basically and each EV owner has a they get a charger when they buy the vehicle and they use that charger and they could plug into the outlet the downside of that is you can't manage a program you don't know how many people are using it when they're using it you can't you know find out when somebody breaks it so there's a lot of downside to that the other station that you have are the level twos so those are the 240 outlets so that'll cost you a little bit more because it's a 40 amp but if you go the outlet route it's again a lot less expensive if you go the charging station route which is maybe a networked charger where you can actually get every it's a web-based system you can get all the stats that you want online which is what I think all of us have actually it's great but it is a little bit more expensive so depending on what type you choose it can run you anywhere from six to eight thousand dollars for the station plus the infrastructure so you have to understand you know again if your company is ROI based maybe it's not a good program for you but if it's not ROI based then maybe it's okay it just depends then you can charge five dollars an hour and make all your money back for it so ours is really a corporate social responsibility initiative instead we're just trying to meet the demand of the employees tenant retention employee retention program so we're not as concerned with the ROI on it just want to try to cover our utility costs which that's why we would be charging a fee yeah I agree I don't think we're looking at at it as an ROI I think we're looking at it as a benefit for our employees but to help mitigate some of that we are putting in some solar technology to to help in one of the buildings that has probably the most charging stations yeah I mean the same for us it's an amenity I mean we do obviously do charge back and so we're trying to at least recover the cost of you know the the electricity but in terms of the infrastructure you know we we nixed the idea maybe of even looking at that because it didn't kind of meet with what we were you know we're looking to do so that's great so you've all mentioned that you use network chargers but there's a discussion in the community about whether it's maybe easier less demand on the utility if you just install a bunch of level one one-to-one outlets so that's one view but you all have certainly taken the approach to install level two or 240 network chargers what what kind of was how did you what was the tipping point there and why did you decide to go that route one could theorize that you know an employee is on campus you know eight hours nine hours a day and so you could trickle charge and have them in a position where they could return home fine yeah some people would have to stay leave their vehicle there all day so the whole then you'd have to have a one-to-one ratio sure and so in order to mitigate that you want to try to go for level two chargers what the network charging does for us is allows us to see what's happening all times I can go on like this morning I went online to go see who was charging I can see who's there because everyone has to register you can see the employee's name when they plugged in how long they plugged in you can see how much kw they're actually using you can pull stats how long your sessions are how many unique drivers you have so although I have only had 62 unique drivers so that means you know 18 of them didn't charge in the last week so there's so many stats you can use and this helps us determine it helps us with our program management of what are we going to do in the future do we need to expand you know how is everything going I have now you know one or two stations that are usually open throughout the day which is great I've never had that before so that's really the I find the advantage to having a network station is all the data that you can get from it we get greenhouse gas savings on there you can see how many gallons of gas you've saved so you can use this to motivate your employees to be more energy conscious right not that we're asking them to buy electric vehicles but we're asking them to be more energy conscious and if they know the company is doing it they're more likely to do it as well and we're definitely a data driven company so I think I'm gonna mirror what she said it's just it's a matter of knowing what's a plan for and then in addition they also have that data and like I said they're now looking to see how they can kind of hack the dashboard in some way so that they can get alerts and be more efficient about their charging great I know that some of the network service providers also provide an opportunity to do kind of managed reservations and I'm curious if that's something that you all have have utilized in your program if you have and scrapped it or if you is something that you're looking to do in the future or I know you're managing through your social media platform seems to be working for now but can you make a comment on that or two sure so there is a reservation system where you can employees can go online and reserve a spot at a particular period at a specific time I don't I'm guessing you guys looked into this too and we decided that we didn't want to do it so there's a couple of problems with it one problem is you actually get charged for that reservation so if you you know text in I want the station at 8 30 in the morning it'll hold your reservation for 15 minutes but it does charge you so when you get to work at 8 35 somebody's car sitting in that spot because I know that reservation will release itself in 10 more minutes and then they get to charge but the person who originally made the reservation still gets still gets charged the 30 or 40 or 50 cents whatever is to make that reservation so what we've from the people that I've talked to who've tried the reservation system it actually created more problems and more fights among the EV owners because someone said hey I reserve that spot now you're in it and so it did become at first it sounded like a good idea but we've decided not to move forward with that and the one company I know that started the reservation system has actually now removed it so that they don't have that problem anymore you looked into that too yeah it's I think we wanted to outsource the management to the community okay you know we're trying to their needs so let them handle that and I think reservations would have been I mean looking at how people you know someone's late to work because of traffic or what have you that messes up the whole thing and it doesn't necessarily I think making it sort of an honor system if you will between these EV owners has worked a lot better than having people to reserve a spot great I know that some some organizations that are using the network chargers typically you have an RFID card or some kind of authentication mechanism to have access to the charging unit are you offering charging only to your own employees or do you also offer it to the public for example I know there's a company here and Mountain View that their charging stations are open only to their employees during the day but then you know on Friday nights and the weekends they open it up to the general public and I think they probably increase the fee or something but I'm curious if that's something that you're doing if so why if not you know is it something you'll do in the future yeah currently we don't and so we offer we have also visitor EV charging spaces but they can also park in any of the other normal EV spaces if they're open but no we're not currently charging I don't think we're looking to to do that in the future so a member of the public can pull into Facebook and charge if there's a space and a charger open and then we have 24-7 security roaming and so the only thing we ask is that they don't stay overnight yeah ours are ours are private so only Juniper employees can use them but they do use a charge point card so and that charge point card can be used for any charge point station but they do have to request access to our stations in order to use them so we do not allow them to be open to the public yeah same thing and we've hidden from the we use charge point as well we're hidden from the network you can go on their map and find all the stations you can't find ours you have to put in an ID name and then request access and then you get access and I think you know I think there's also a liability question around that as well in terms of you know you don't want to make you know you know it's something to happen or at least that's the lawyers you want something to happen to somebody coming onto your property that's not covered and we have a our process we have a waiver that all employees sign to wait you know release net up from the liability in case they shock themselves or scratch somebody a car and and we can't police that with public so great great well I do want to save a few minutes for questions from the audience but before we do that can you can you each just maybe name one of the top one or two challenges you've faced and then kind of how you've solved it and any kind of creative solutions you've come up with in solving any of your kind of initial challenges that you've had in implementing your programs I think demand is probably the the first one but also permitting so you know our permit process probably with the city takes about four months minimum and so when we know that the infrastructure is there you kind of have to plan far enough ahead so that you know the permitting process goes through fortunately like I said we've got a pretty good group of EV owners on site and so they're definitely willing to share where needed I mean if somebody says hey you know I can't find us a plug and I need to get at least this far typically somebody will step up and and allow them to do that ours has probably been etiquette charging station etiquette I know we all talk about that quite a bit but that's been resolved now that I have a few more stations but as I said before you know these owners just ended up creating their own distribution list end up talking to each other I help them create an etiquette platform and so our signage out of the charging stations actually has that etiquette basically it's use your common sense and be considerate move your car when it's finished charging it's another advantage actually of network charging which I don't think we forgot to talk about is the network charge will actually give an alert to the EV driver when his car is done charging so they'll know automatically and the etiquette there is within an hour so that your vehicle has finished charging go ahead and move it so I do think etiquette has probably been one of the biggest challenges and resolving it by getting a distribution group getting our EV council so we have a representative of the EV drivers that will help make those decisions and keep our program meeting the needs of the drivers yeah I mean you know one of our challenge obviously is figuring out how to do pricing but I think we've solved that and people are and say they're everybody love it to be free but it's but it I think it works out for them you know and it's obviously this how do we scale and how do we and figuring out the right process to and we want to have a procedure in place to manage getting new people and that was it took us a lot of work through that so great well I think we have some roaming mics in the room we'll take a few questions if you have a question please raise your hand state your name your title your affiliation and please direct a specific question to our panel Hi John Mashi tech advisor quick question I mean one of the things that I'm struck by is how Silicon Valley companies have now become urban planner and transportation providers right was that fair to say yeah I mean there's a certain element I'm curious have you seen the book The High Cost of Free Parking by Dawn Schupe from UCLA no you might not a look at that because there's some interesting lessons in terms of pricing and behavior and a lot of other related things the other one is I don't know if you've run into them that little company Street Line and once you make the parking sensors and know what their cars there are not and have a lot of information systems and a lot of statistics on how people behave but those those two things are things you might want to look into because I think there may be some good synergies of their kind of stuff with again the much bigger role that companies are now taking on in driving transport infrastructure thank you yeah we've definitely we've looked at Street Line ourselves and we're we're gonna hopefully test or pilot that option for our there was a question here I got the mic here over there okay please okay can I go ahead yes we can't see you because of the lights lights that do right oh maybe I walk over here or maybe there's something supernatural going on please please state your name and your my name is Paul Grant since 2006 I've been an independent energy technology due diligence consultant here in Silicon Valley prior to that I had a 40 year career with IBM that's 40 not 14 and I'm one of the co-inventors on the international patent for high temperature super conductivity that career was followed by 12 years at Electric Power Research Institute I have a client it's a famous U.S. university it's not Stanford it's not Harvard but they have a proposal they want me to look over where they're proposing to have inductive charging not plug-in but inductive charging under the street the proposal is more or less directed to urban parking in stripped topography by the way one of the professors involved is a former undersecretary at a DOE for science my question is simply this would this be useful in a wide area commercial environment like your companies have specifically you're talking about inductive charging yeah you know the physics involved right okay so that we just drive over and charge as a car right I have heard of that technology actually for us and for technology companies I don't know that that would be the right way to go with this because it is a little bit more expensive you probably have to make in public I could see that working in retail hotels that sort of environment I don't know about technology companies I mean pretty much have the same employees hopefully coming every day to work so having a fixed infrastructure system versus you know uprooting the in the pavement everything else and it's it's think it makes more sense for our companies move around a lot okay physically the buildings move around a lot now you've answered my question thanks for helping me do my job sure no problem thank you there's a question there in the back oh it's a test already we'll start here in the front actually I'm sorry we had two at once yeah Jan Pepper from Silicon Valley Power I have two questions I guess one for Brian about the pricing I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you decided on what the pricing would be and then the second for all of you is how you selected the vendors and if you had an RFP if you considered it all operating the stations yourselves as opposed to having a vendor operate it for you on the pricing was a it was a ongoing process internally to discuss and I think everybody who was engaged in it came down to the idea of you know not charging for the infrastructure and charging for the average for the building it would be for dealing by building by building then you have issues with people going well I'm gonna charge at the the cheap building versus having the average so it's much made much more sense that way you know and they're obviously not trying to recoup all the money that went into it and obviously not the electricity since we're using an average but that gets us at least you know some sort of control management of engagement so in terms of vendors you know we looked at a couple of vendors we also did some benchmarking and talking to other companies in their experience and and really charge point we charged was the one that kind of rose up in terms of met what we were looking for in terms of the price of the actual charging stations and the quality and you know the concerns we had maybe some of the other vendors and the network aspect was benefit as well did you want to answer yeah go ahead I can answer you have two different types of chargers like I mentioned the DC charger fast charger wasn't necessarily one that was you know in high demand but it was part of the DOE grant that we received with blink and so yeah it just depended on the on the type of grant that we got and how we chose our ours but again same thing I mean we wanted to make sure we spoke with other companies to make sure that that the charging stations were we're definitely capable of what we needed so there's a question there in the back yes hi Josh I thank you for your idea of having a 120 level one outlet for parking lot and I support your idea and I think the the corporation or company should have at least 40 to 50 percent of their parking space that has electrical plug and actually right now it's happening on Castro Street if you see every tree under under the tree there is electrical plug there so think of it charging station are very expensive but if you put 120 volt plug there and you know they they they can just sit there all day they don't have to move their car they can concentrate to do what they need to do at work and also is much much cheaper for adding 120 volt outlet than a charging stations and your you're saying that yes the power you cannot monitor and but there are a lot of of of energy monitor device out there that you can like to put a city clamps for each breakers or as you know a voltage sensor and current sensor you'll be able to monitor how much energy is going to EV charging so I'm just want to say I support Josh idea of the 120 volt charging and I hope all three of you would consider bringing this idea back to your employers at your have like 40 percent to 50 percent of your parking space to have 120 volt and you do need to have 240 volt for the sales and marketing and employee who need to go to see doctor in the middle of the day for them to charge and for visitor of course like me and um I just want I've been we've been EV driving for a long time like in 2000 from 2000 so we love plugs and we we have an antenna and we can see the plug very easily so thank you very much thank you for your comment I just want to say I wasn't necessarily endorsing level one only in parking lots as the solution but it's certainly something that comes up as a topic of conversation and potentially a way to solve some of the some of the issues so let's take one more question here I think up front Hi I'm Warren from Center for Resource Solutions we're a non-profit in San Francisco I heard solar mentioned just very briefly a couple times I'm wondering is that something in terms of renewable energy that's being discussed amongst your employees and have you considered either on-site generation or maybe renewable energy certificates to match the electricity that's going through the the charging stations sure we'll go first okay yeah so yeah we we definitely looked at it I think it was a matter of space on our campus for us and so we're actually installing the solar panels that we have that we have going in soon on the roof of one of our buildings but it's and we also have that for our fitness center to create warm water but it's just a matter of I think space for us and I mean obviously cost as well but but yeah we definitely want to do as much as we can in that area it's just been a challenge because of our campus in our garage we actually have solar panels installed on the roof of the garage that supplies power to the garage lighting and to the station so I guess I could technically say I use solar powered for the charging stations but I have seen that and what I would like to see the technology grow into is a solar panel on the station itself that's built in it's integrated to the station those are very expensive today but that's where I think the technology should go get this stuff off the grid really if that's really you know where we're headed to I don't know that you can make one 10 solar but we could try right okay we'll talk after great did you have a comment or with same problems I mean roof space obviously is limited and the ROI talk about ROI calculation on that it's that's a harder sell I think so great still looking I didn't mean to cut you off still looking great well I think we're out of time the next session is supposed to be in here in about four minutes so let's give a round of applause to our engaging panel and discussion thank you