 Obviously, many of you are in town for a very, very important conference looking at the whole world of alternative fuels and leaves. What does this really mean for the country? Why is it important? Why do we care? What's the role of policy, ethnicity, and labor level in terms of addressing the whole issue of alternative fuels? We have been talking about the need to reduce oil use in this country for decades now. We have often been seen as key with regard to looking at the very important role of alternative fuels. And that there have been many, many issues presented in terms of why it's important to move on to oil and to really look at a much more diversified fuel portfolio. And the issues range from obviously security issues, health issues, economic development, keeping energy dollars local, looking at overall security, what it means to put up, oh still, over a billion dollars out every day in this country for imported oil. And those are obviously dollars that could be used here in the United States in terms of other economic development. There are public health implications, environmental issues, so there are a range of issues around the whole issue of oil, alternative fuels, how do we do a better job with regard to all of our vehicles and what is the appropriateness of different things in different places. I think that it's very exciting that there are about 100 clean cities coalitions around the country covering 46 states. And this has grown considerably over the course of the last 20 years. Hopefully we'll see it expand even further. There are a range of fuels and different applications that we are going to be hearing about this morning. And I think the other thing that's important is what we will hear about from our speakers this morning is they come from different places geographically and for some serve in many areas around the country in terms of having a priority. And there are a range of applications and also a range of fuels in terms of looking at diversity. One of the most important parts to understand is that it's not just one answer but we really are looking at a portfolio in terms of really encouraging diversity. And we'll hear about more about why and how these different fuels have been selected and used for their uses and what's the status and the progress from our speakers. We are going to turn to Richard Battersea who is executive director of the East Bay Clean Cities Coalition in California. But he is also a board member of TEP in Transportation Energy Partners. He comes from a long background with more than 25 years of experience in terms of working on alternative fuels being involved with them in terms of late management goals more than 40 different certifications of excellence with regard to heading up sleep management services for UC Davis for a number of years. So we're very pleased that Richard has come up and provided an overview of what we see in the city and the overall depiction that we're then going to hear about more things from our leaders. Thank you Carol. Like you mentioned I have a pretty good background in fleet. Some of you might suspect that I'm not a public speaker by trade and by the end of this I will confirm that suspicion. But I'm here today with the Transportation Energy Partners and I want to talk a little bit about alternative fuels and the importance of federal policies in reducing our nation's dependence on foreign petroleum. Next slide please. Just a brief overview of Transportation Energy Partners. We provide policy support to the Queen Cities Coalition over almost 100 coalitions nationwide and 18,000 stakeholders throughout the nation. We keep the stakeholders and the coalitions informed on important policies initiatives and funding opportunities and as you see here today we also educate decision makers about the importance of alternative fuels. Next slide please. Why are alternative fuels critical? And I got a nice visual up there. One of the key points folks usually recognize the environmental aspect of alternative fuels and they probably get the energy security component as well. But there's a huge economic benefit to using alternative fuels since our nation currently spends over a billion dollars a day on foreign petroleum and you can see by the visual I've got bill gates that are next to $100 bills. That's how much our nation sends overseas every day on petroleum products. And you might wonder how do I know that bill gates? Well who else has 10 pallets of $100 bills? Next slide please. I'm also the executive director of the Queen Cities program. A little bit about Queen Cities program that's sponsored by Department of Energy. I mentioned the numbers under coalitions, 18,000 stakeholders. But what we do is we bring folks together. We're actually on the ground one of the only or the only initiatives that actually are engaged with alternative fuel vehicle deployment and infrastructure deployment. And we bring folks together, fleets, fuel providers, infrastructure providers, sometimes funding providers and we're just that catalyst that brings everyone together for a successful project. Okay, I'll just keep going. Anyway, since 1993 we've displaced more than 5 billion gallons and that's very significant throughout the nation. And if the last slide we're cutting is good. Next slide, the little visual there shows the 5 billion gallons. You can go back to the other one. That's it. I mentioned before, benefits of alternative fuels. It's the 3Ds. It's the energy, the economics and then the environmental security of our nation. All these things roll up to a much bigger picture though. It's actually an issue of importance to national security. We spend a lot of time sending our folks in the armed forces, myself being a veteran down this first hand, helping our allies who we rely upon for petroleum fuels. That billion dollars a day that we send overseas if we could keep that here in the United States domestically producing the fuels, making the vehicles, using the fuels here in the United States. There would be a huge economic benefit to our country as well as the environmental aspect too. Clean Cities deploys four main strategies, alternative, renewable fuels, idle reduction measures, fuel economy improvements and new technologies. We're focusing on the alternative fuels here today. Next slide please. You might wonder, I apologize if the slide's a bit washed out. This just shows the different alternative fuels currently in use. The lion's share, almost 73%, or excuse me, this shows the different strategies currently in use to reduce our nation's independence on foreign petroleum. The majority is alternative fuel and vehicles at 73% at the big green slice of the fly. Next slide please. And this shows the contributions by fuel type, the different alternative fuels in use. The largest number, over 60% is natural gas currently, biodiesels at 17%, ethanol, E85 ethanol at 11%, and propane about 8%, and electrics 3%. There are some others, hydrogen, small quantity. And the numbers at the bottom show just last year the petroleum displaced by Clean Cities. Year to year increase of almost 11%. We did 531 million gallons last year. Next slide please. This shows the number of alternative fuel vehicles in use in our country. I'm not going to break down each one. I'm just going to point out a couple of significant points here. The purple numbers are E85 vehicles. It doesn't look very purple on that slide. The darkish blue on that version. Those are E85 vehicles. You can see there's a significant number over the last six or seven years. And even more importantly, that number does not include vehicles in the hands of private citizens. That's just fleet vehicles. So we have large numbers of E85 vehicles. The bar across the bottom represents electric vehicles showing slow steady growth. Next slide please. This slide is the alternative fuel vehicle stations currently deployed. And as I mentioned on the previous slide, we've got large numbers of E85 capable flex fuel vehicles being deployed. But the number of the stations that are represented there across the bottom and green, the station count is still relatively small. So there's a huge opportunity out there with E85 where the vehicles are out on the ground running. They're running on gasoline for the most part because we haven't caught up with the vehicle count and the station count. And then also, if you notice the top bar is on the right, the light blue, those are electric vehicle stations. So we're getting a lot of electric vehicle stations out there on the ground but the number of vehicles hasn't quite caught up with the station count. So those are sort of flip-flop scenarios. Next slide please. So why is federal initiatives incentive and support important to these efforts? Well, we really need a combination of public and private partnership. We need the federal policies and we also need the federal funding to continue these programs. It's very difficult to get some of these technologies from the laboratories out onto the ground, so it's important that the federal government establishes policies and also provides funding to keep these programs going. Three key points that we're hoping to communicate today is we want to ensure funding is maintained for federal programs such as the DOE vehicle technologies program and the ETA clean diesel program. We'd like to see the tax incentives for alternative fuel vehicles and infrastructure extended and we'd also like to preserve the renewable fuel standard. Next slide please. And to help us further the discussion, we brought some folks from the National Association and fleet administrators to talk about some very specific alternative fuel vehicle projects. NAPA is the premier fleet industry organization in the United States. It's been around since 1957. It's got over 2,200 fleet members that control over 6 million vehicles. And I will say the gentlemen at the table are my colleagues not just from the industry and from NAPA but also through the Clean Cities Coalition over the year. So we're going to hear from Claude Masters who's from Florida Power and Light and he's president of the NAPA Fleet Management Association. And then Jeffrey Jeter who's the fleet manager of Chesterfield County, Virginia and Treasurer of NAPA and also Steve Saltzgeber who's vice president of Fleet Management for Public Services and chair of NAPA's Government Affairs Committee. So with that I'll turn the microphone over to Claude. You want to hear me okay? All right. So let me give you a brief introduction to NAPA. Appreciate the kind introduction there my friend. And first let me apologize real quick because the common culture TDP asked me to come to speak and they said they got 12 minutes and I tried to decline because as you can tell I'm not from around this part of the country. It typically takes me 5 to 10 minutes to say hello. So I just ate up one minute about 12 minutes of time. So with that let me give you a quick background on NAPA. So what is NAPA and what we do? So essentially NAPA is a not-for-profit membership society that serves the needs of those practicing what we like to call the Art and Science of Automotive Fleet Management. So the best way to think of it is think of NAPA being the AMA to the medical perfection we are that basically that association that provides that type of support to the fleet industry. So next slide. So as you can see we've got over 3200 members and suppliers across the United States and Canada and we have members in every state in the United States and every province of Canada. And the average fleet size of our members is 2100 pieces of equipment. So next slide please. So with that let's say well what does NAPA do? Essentially what we like to tell people is that we provide solutions. So as you can see our members tell us of those five core things that we do up there. Each one has kind of their own perspective on what piece of that brings the most value. Some people say networking and being able to talk to another member of fleet managers is very important because they can believe intelligence that way. Others say that they just want us to be their representation on Capitol Hill and others say that I'm strictly in for the education and how that relates to where we are today is the fact that our curriculum, NRCA FM program has a lot of content that helps educate fleet managers about alternative fuels, how to make those business cases and which selections are right for them. Next slide please. So you might say well why are we here today and essentially we're here to help provide facts and fact build information. So we've got a panel of gentlemen here, we've had years and years, people have typically probably a couple hundred years of fleet expertise and experience that can help tell you a little bit about what works and what doesn't work in specific applications and give you a little history about what works best for them. Next slide please. And next slide. So again as Mr. Baddenby kindly said, I currently am the manager of vehicle acquisitions and fuel for the Florida Crown of Lights so that means that I get to deal with not only bringing all the alternative fuel vehicles into our fleet but I get to make decisions about what kind of fuel we run them on. Next slide please. So just to give you a quick history, there's a lot of granularity there and FPL has a fairly extensive experience in operating a hybrid plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicle that takes back into the 90s and you can see the breakdown there, I won't bring them all to you but as you can see that we've evolved with technology so most people in this room know that hybrid electric vehicles have been around for quite some time. Plug-in hybrid electric are becoming more and more common from an OEM perspective and you also see a lot of battery electric vehicles taking their way into the market place. So with that, next slide please. I want to talk a little bit about how this technology is evolving in the medium of heavy duty truck market. So FPL was very heavily involved in the development of hybrid bucket trucks for use at job site. We actually ensured a working group that partnered with the Department of Defense and CalSTAR to help develop this technology and today we have 74 of those vehicles in our fleet with a great deal of success with the operational experience with those vehicles. We've also incorporated a number of battery electric vehicles in our fleet. We've got transit connects and international peace stars in our fleet as well so we get a lot of operational experience with those vehicles about what works, what applications to put them in and where they're better suited in regards to, in regards to the way that they're operating in the real world. So next slide please. So through our efforts we received quite a bit of, for lack of a better term, public accolades. It depends, there's a lot of industry journals out there where you're at and comparatively to each other some are self-reporting but we have been awarded the 8th largest hybrid electric fleet in the nation by Greenfleet magazine last year and we're continuing to escalate the way that we apply that technology. So we were having a conversation last night and I think that the point that we would like to try to make today is that a lot of people will debate what technology is the best or what fuels the cleanest but I can tell you for sure that one thing that I've learned over my years of experience is the cleanest gallon of fuel that will ever burn is the one that we don't have to burn. So the point is that as you stack these technologies so like when we take our hybrid electric bucket trucks that can run on the job site in electric mode, run the electric PTO and then you stack that with the B20 biodiesel blend in your truck so you now it displays 20% of your petroleum burn so a typical bucket truck that might burn 10 gallons of fuel a day is down in the neighborhood of 5 to 6 gallons of petroleum diesel so we think that's a commendable effort. Next page please. And so I want to talk just real briefly about our biobased program because we're real proud of it. The Department of Energy tells us that we're one of the largest users of biodiesel in the southeast. We have over 1,700 trucks in our fleet that run on B20 daily and the thing that often comes into play is we don't have any lack of better term issues with operating biodiesel that you hear from time to time from other people and a lot of it has to do with the way that we buy and blend our own fuel. We are a registered fuel blender so we buy the 101 that ourselves and we have two million gallon storage tank that we blend it in and so we provide a very tight fuel spec and that we understand that the feedstock comes from a renewable source and it's domestically grown so we're very proud of that and then you can see the numbers in regards to the emissions reductions and the total energy usage that we see here over here. That is a kind of shiny testament to how effective those programs can be when you look at the way that you operate your vehicles and you see year over year that your fuel burn is going down and yet your fleet count continues to be steady or gradually increases you know that you're having a positive impact. So with that I think the last thing that I'd like to say about that is that it helps you when you know that you can see that you're making an effort and it aligns with your corporate strategy and your corporate vision to do everything that you possibly can do not only help reduce our dependence on fuel but also reduce the emissions, the overall emissions profile of our fleet. So with that I think I might be a little bit ahead which I like to, I told you I was going to run along but I really want to try to save some time at the end for questions so with that I'm going to turn the podium over to Mike Radnick or Jeff T. Go on everybody. Thanks Mike. Like I said I'm a local women's county government so I like my big hitters, my buddies up here but we're just as important in some things that we get through and first of all I'm an exceptional county fleet manager with a little over 2,400 vehicles that I'm in charge of and we're doing our best to go to all terms with fuels. I have a passion for that. I love it. Over the years I've had the honor to work in the Virginia Clean City to help me get some programs going and then currently working on the lion's auto gas, lots of fuel that are helping with these. When I go to sell those programs to my officials in the county they're always asking me, Jeff, why are we going to do this? So I've always said like three main reasons that I always look at you know the degrees are behind the corn, the greasing air pollution lower costs of fuel, those are the three and they always ask me to categorize them. I go, I used to do it every time I was asked that I always moved them around to change it. So now really all three of those to me are the number one priority to look at. Then I actually added a fourth one to that that it actually increases where a lot of jobs are needed. So we're looking at that next week. This slide here is showing the little picture in the middle if we actually got our local TV news channel came in and did a story on us with our police vehicles that we just did with the lion's auto gas. So, you know, why use auto gas is what I can give to my supervisors. It improves air quality, 50% less CO, 68% less NOx, and 99% less particularly. The availability has got the height of the refueling site to any other alternative fuel. It sends natural gas to help diversify the energy supply. The quick installation, the LPG refueling infrastructure couldn't be installed and within 30 to 60 days we just had that in my location. Where if you look at the natural gas you're looking six months to a year for the installation to be done. So that's why I wouldn't call it gas on that. Low infrastructure, you know, I did a kit in the site is far less lower than C&G. LP cars, while looking at my municipalities I can do a conversion now and a police producer for roughly $4200. And then I'll have some pictures in here a little bit later where it shows some of the different sites and how easy they are to install. Also, the performance of the mix. I've got school lessons, I've got police crews who's the operator that we love. Once we train them and talk about it, especially diesel engines, you know, they can be accelerated now and they're gone. Police officers, they absolutely love them for performance. This slide here, I only showed about 12 vehicles over six months period. Just the cost savings that I saved per month. October before we actually kicked it off last year so it was a little low. Everything was going good until January-February. That's when all the coal there hit out west and we started missing the propane. The supply wasn't there and cost really went high. So we lost it in February, but then Mar-Table maybe we're starting to come back out there. So this is what I'm trapped every month on that. Next slide, please. This year's just a comparison of what I'm showing. It shows like in October and I purchased 345 gallons of auto gas. And what it's showing in the next column is the metric times the CO of the pit, I don't use gasoline for that amount. I would admit 3.05. The LP was 2.01, so I had a 1.05 reduction for that month. So overall, you can see that it was 15.4 reductions by using the LP over gasoline and metric times. And then count to see if it was almost 34. So these are just comparisons that I'm writing to show that even a small municipality fleet, you know, we're doing our part in saving. This is the one I'm really happy with. This is my sheriff's department. This is actually on 20 vehicles. I was shown a roughly 27,000 miles per year and it's got MPG for gasoline. It's 15 and propane is roughly 12. So you lose a little bit. But I'm right wise gas with it. This time was $3.14 per tank of 126. So you can see the savings. The monthly savings per vehicle was $253. So for all 20 vehicles, I actually saved almost $61,000 that year. And I looked at that and now I went back to my officials and I said $61,000. What can we do with that? Then we just saved up gasoline. That was 2.5 to 3.3 as we could have purchased. It's two full-time positions we could put in. So it helped fund a lot of different areas. So I'm real happy with that. And this does not include the school bus. This will just 20 police vehicles that we could have in the savings zone. Next slide, please. And this is just some of the things I'm showing on my service vehicle that we've actually done. This is one that I actually put a land bottle gas to help me take care of the conversion of this one. This is just one of my service engines that we have out for our school today. It runs all over the county. So we put the details on it. The public is really supporting us, wanting us to do more. But the funding, you know, I'll plead to you guys just a little bit on that. Next slide. This is one of my police cruisers. This is just one of the markings on the back. I can't put a whole lot of detail on my police cruisers. I'm a criminal weapon. But by law, I've got a little propane sticker on the back right there. Next slide. This is the conversion of this one. This is actually one of the trauma of the four police cruises around here. It's just a double paint up in the wheel well area. It's very simple to work on. Next slide. This is the fuel site. When I was talking about how easy it is to install this, my work relation with the lighting is lost in fuel. You know, we talked about this. This unit came in with a skid mount. And I'm talking 30 days. It took me longer to run the power and this tank could have did it for these guys and put it into good operation for me. That's how quick we got it up and going. That's why I picked it out again for my family. Next slide. This is a larger tank. The first one I did was probably a thousand gallons. This was 10,000 gallons. I had this at a previous job that I had when I had the school division on there. And again, we probably had this one installed within 90 days. It's just a little bit larger tank. It didn't come in on skid. It's just a dispenser. It shows all the gallons. It's got a keypad where I can track all the information. It's just a very simple clean operation for this. Next slide, please. So how can you help? That's what I'm looking for right now. I would love to, like, Rickson, I'd love to see you to cast this and just come back. This really helps with municipalities like mine. You know, when we get that 50% per gallon rebate back to go towards converting more vehicles. Definitely grant funding. The slide I showed you was $61,000. That was actually through Virginia Clean Cities. I was able to get those at no cost to my county. I just had to provide the vehicle. And that was a no-brainer for me to sell that. Currently, around H.S.O. County, we're actually having a fund office because the grant money is gone. And the Virginia Clean Cities did all they could do. And, you know, hoping and praying that they're getting more funding. But, you know, it's just, it's just, the municipalities are really excited that as we move forward with auto gas in our areas. Work on more funding for infrastructure. So here, I'm going to talk with them, my state, where we're trying to get public-private partnership on our fueling infrastructure, which could be compressed natural gas, could be LP, could be off. But we just need help with the funding. One of the big things I'd like to see is OEMs, you know, with Congress and everybody, you see what they can do about actually making a true, vital fuel propane business so that we can buy it from the OEMs like that without doing the converted. I know that hurts my partners. We'll talk about line of auto gas and all of it. It would make it a lot easier for us in the county to do that. And I'm just helping do some of the red tape. There's so much red tape going through that we have that everywhere. But I'm local government, so we're trying our best, you know. We're all excited. We'd like to applaud the saying that we've got so many different little cities and counties within the state of Virginia. Everybody's on board wanting to go to the OEMs because it is currently the cheapest, quickest, and best way for us. We're looking at CNG. We're looking at E85. We've got all those with the fueling infrastructure just not there. I'm real excited about auto gas. That's the way I'm going with it. I've got my shop certified. We can actually do the install of health now. We're certified to work on them. And all of that came from funding and help from Alliance Automated. So I'll let go of that. Thank you. I'm speaker before we open it up for Q&A. Good to see health givers who's by the president of Clean Management for Republic Services. And he brings a very rich background having been also a clean manager for Coca-Cola refreshments for the state of Georgia and also for the state of Utah. Thank you very much. It's good to be here and speak a little bit about the alternative fields I've been now in this business. I always say over 30 years now. It's probably getting closer in 40 years. I've had the opportunity to work for several different states and an opportunity to work for a couple of private companies as well. Just recently joined Republic Services. And so I'm still getting my feet on the ground there. But Republic Services, I'll tell you a little bit about the Canadians. Many of you may know. Some of you live in the Washington area. You'll see refuge trucks running around with triple A on the side. That's one of our subsidiaries here in this area. Republic Services is a feeding space company. So if you see me yawning out there, it's about six o'clock in the morning back where I'm from. But we're an industry leader in waste management. And fortunately in 500 counties we have about 30,000 employees in 40 states in Puerto Rico. We operate 332 collection companies in a matter of 595 transportation. As I walked out of the hotel yesterday morning on my way to breakfast, I could smell a transportation somewhere close. That's the smell of money. In this business, we do everything we can to take care of our customers. Customers are what we're all about. And we have currently about 1,800 natural gas vehicles that we're operating. And so why natural gas for that kind of fight? Well, let's talk about industry production a little bit harder since it's not my turn to look at that and forgive me. C&T trucks are what we're focused on through Republic Services. In my previous background that was mentioned, Coca-Cola, for example, we were working on. We had 800 hybrid electric trucks and we were doing some C&G, some met, some biodiesel. So the one thing that you heard from our panel up here is that there is not one size fits all. And depending on the business that you operate and the opportunities that you have, you need to really adapt to what makes sense for your business. Having worked for two different states and four different governors, we had quite a portfolio that we put together for each of those applications as well. So one of the things that I will say is I've gone through a different state of complete management is you become pretty diverse in your background of what works in alternative fields. One of the things that we're working on currently is hydraulic hybrid, which is not a real new technology that's been around for a while, but that's also a good application for the revenue to business. And so we're testing currently out in Chula Vista, California, a couple of vehicles. We're going to be moving that to Cleveland here shortly and making a couple tests there. We're hoping that that technology is very lucrative for us to try in addition to C&G in our portfolio. A couple of applications we had in Coca-Cola when I was there were the hybrid electric vehicles, which were much like the Prius. You know, they turned the engine off and we were all talking just earlier and I always like Claude's statement about the cleanest fields when you don't burn. And you think about what we're trying to do in big industrial applications and commercial applications is we're trying to not burn fuel at any time where it's wasted. And probably the biggest waste is when that truck is idle. And you don't have an opportunity all the time to save that fuel unless you can figure out a way to shut that truck down. So once some of the things that other applications are using are telematics, we're monitoring weight management. Imagine in a registered business that one of those trucks has about 12 ton payloads as we're going from stop to stop by the time we dump. And so the more we can manage that waste, you're better routing, better route optimization. Driver behavior is a big key factor. So we're looking at all types of solutions besides alternative fields as we go forward. Next slide. You can go to the next slide. One of the things that we look at at Republic Services is, you know, why are we doing this? First of all, it's the right thing to do. As a corporate citizen and a corporate partner, we want to be economically responsible. At Republic Services, if you see our star, it's made up of five hearts. And one of those stars is responsible. And so as we go through, we look at different applications. We want to make sure that we are that corporate citizen. It's cleaner. The emissions are lower. It's increasingly alternative fields are mandated, but we're doing it because it's the right thing to do in our business. It's local. Natural gases have done up here in the United States. It's a domestic field. And probably the best thing for the Republic Service are any Fortune 500 company like we are, is it's cheaper. And it helps us grow the bottom line as we're out there competing for customers and different. Next slide. Solid waste industry is a large natural gas vehicle market. There's about two billion gallons a year in our market, 200,000 trucks that are addressable. And so you can imagine the size of this, the scope of this market. And this is a really, C&G is a good application for the refugee industry. We do a lot of start and stop as you can imagine as we're picking up commercial, municipal and residential trash. As we go through, we're burning a lot of fuel. We measure fuel by the gallons per hour and the cost per hour versus the miles per gallon. Traditionally, we're currently running somewhere around $14 an hour for diesel fuel. And natural gas is about $10 per hour. So I think it's kind of the scale and scope of what we're operating out there. So every single gallon we can save per hour really helps our bottom line. It also helps the market out there. And certainly our health would be, you know, people out there in the market. Most of our trucks have somewhere between $35 and $50 diesel gallons and put the ones on them and C&G. And one of the things that we consider as we go and start deploying this is our fleet returns to base every night. So we have our infrastructure put on site and then we connect those at night and plug it in. So that's one of the things that we look at. And C&G actually, for us, requires a little bit less infrastructure than some of the other applications out there. Let's take a point. This just gives you an idea of what we were doing to deploy this last year. We currently have 1,800 trucks in service, which is about 12% or 16,000 fleet. And you see, we put those in very key markets. We're continuing to have steady growth. We built 10 fueling stations and the 2013, those stations are a few million dollars each to build. It costs us about 400,000 to 400,000 to separate our shops so we can work on these vehicles. So we've got quite an investment in this technology. We have a total of about 31 fueling sites now nationwide. That's 31 of about 400 operations that we're currently running. This is just a glide path to give you kind of an idea of where we're going with our natural gas operation. Currently, we're about 14. We're adding about 400 to 500 trucks a year as we go through the process. And I'll give you an idea of going out. Our plan is to be over 3,000 trucks in the next few years. One other thing, these are just some of the considerations that we look at as we start to deploy trucks. So we want to continue to meet our regulatory mandates and the environment's continuing to become more regulatory out there. We want to be our good corporate citizens as I mentioned before. We look at where we're going to deploy these fleets. We look at where our largest fleets are where we can get the best bang-in-the-box, so to speak. And we also want to make sure we have good OEM support, dealer support, so we can maintain these vehicles properly. Flea returns to base. And then we want to be a suitable size flea. So we're close to access to actual pipeline and adequate space that you can imagine at the up-to-air shops. And we want to make sure we have the proper permitting that has to happen as you go through to work for the city. It takes us about one year of prep work to put in one of these operations. As we go through, we work through the instruction and the city planning zone and all those different things that you have to go through to get these sites deployed. Our flea composition, we look at our replacement cycle. Did you imagine a couple of, I'll talk about a couple of advantages and disadvantages, but we need to deploy these vehicles. We're trying to do about, really the sweet point for us is about 50 trucks out of sight. And if we go into a site with a hundred trucks, we're replacing half that flea in one year. And that gives us some logistical hoops that we have to jump through down the road because now that means in 10 years out of that, please do a replacement. So we've had to divide some creative strategies to go in and when we call our trickle-down truck strategy, we'll take trucks and we'll start logistically moving those around the country to fill in gaps so that we can offset some of that. So as those trucks begin to age, we trickle them down and move them around. And we've had to do that to keep our costs down to make this economically feasible. Next slide. One thing I mentioned earlier, and you've heard a lot of us talk about this, there is no one-size-fits-all, so you have to be aware that when you're a fleet manager, location makes a big difference just like real estate. Location, location, location. We want to make sure we have these in the right spot. The shop improvements and so on, and I've talked about are critical. You need to make sure you have all everything in place before you deploy these. And then one of the other challenges that we have in the market is we don't have enough suppliers. Currently, in our market with natural gas, we have one engine supplier that's Cummins Diesel. One of the things that we would like to see is a little bit more competition in that. Probably Cummins would not like to see more competition, but for us, that would be critical as we go forward and really look at to deploy more of these vehicles. Some of the other challenges that we have, or as I mentioned, logistic can be a challenge for us, moving 60,000 trucks all around the country to try and accommodate or support the deployment of some of these vehicles. Weight and payload are a big challenge for the refuge industry. We have a lot of bridge lines out there that we have to make payment in need. And as you put in different engines and add tanks to trucks, that has increased weight. So we're having to, wherever we add weight, we have to take away weight so that we don't increase our payload. Payload to the refuge industry is money. So we have to go through and really look at that and all the opportunities and scale those down. There's a lot of creative things happening in the industry. A lot of our partners are really helping us to manage some of those obstacles that we see. One of the things, too, that we don't talk about a lot, the power outage, too, is an opportunity or a challenge for us. We lose power. We can't charge trucks. So we have to have emergency generators on all of our sites where we can deploy those operations. This just gives you an idea of what our field sites would like. You know, you go into any one of our operations around the country or pretty much what's exactly like this. Our operators will back into those sites, plugged in them, and let them fill overnight so that they're ready for the next day of use. It's a pretty select, easy way to do the fill-up. We're having pretty good luck getting around with our drivers, so it's been very well received around the country where we can deploy that. Probably the best thing about the natural gas operation that we're operating in the public is our customers like it. We want several contracts so from an economical standpoint that's a big benefit as well because the communities walk cleaner air. They want to know that we're good corporates and so that's a big thing. Next slide. And finally, this really talks about what I just said but it means ultimately the benefits for the environment, the benefits for operational. I was just in Houston about a month ago when we were bringing our board of directors for the public down there to look at our operation in the Houston area. We had three trucks lined up sitting outside of our shop and you can hear the two diesel trucks out there running. And we asked the diesels to shut down the trucks. And the C&G truck was running also which you cannot hear. It was very compelling to see that. And you know, quiet trucks, especially refuse trucks and they're rolling around in your neighborhood at seven in the morning. That's a big advantage for our customers. We're not waking up anybody and we're rolling to the town pretty quiet. So we see that as a big advantage. Obviously the financial benefits so we see almost the savings of $3 an hour in the field and then our customers are starting to really identify with natural gas and that's becoming more and more of a request as we start working with our customers out there in the morning. Black lives. So that's all I have. We'll take questions and hope you like it. That was terrific all of you. A lot of information and again it's always compelling to hear also in such a short period of time in terms of looking at the range of applications, the diversity of fuels, all of the reasons, the multiple benefits of why alternative fuels and it also makes good sense in terms of economics. So whether it's security, public health, environment and obviously the economics have to work and the numbers that you were talking about very, very impressive. So let's open it up for your questions and comments. I'm a little concerned about the support for natural gas in terms of the environmental destruction from fracking the toxic chemicals which seems to be trading clean air for clean water and the notion of still having to drill and have pipelines and the environmental destruction of it associated with that. I've heard of garbage trucks in upstate New York that are 100% plugins. So I'm wondering what the future of that is what is the future of burning the garbage for fuel. I do believe Henry Ford had a hemp-operated electric car. Is anyone looking at hemp as a source of fuel? Switchgrass has talked about it one time. I'm heartened by some of the emphasis on the electric vehicles and hopefully batteries will somehow improve to extend the charge and mileage for charge. But in the meantime, what about some of the other options? I'll tackle that one. First on the fracking is that natural gas in the transportation industry is actually less than 1% of all natural gas used in the United States. We try not to make the association with fracking taking a position one way or the other. We also know that the major uses of natural gas are currently for heating and electricity so it's rather unfair to come to the transportation industry that represents less than 1% of the fracking issue. That being said, the other technologies are certainly viable. You mentioned something about burning trash for fuel. We actually have several significant projects that take landfill waste and turn it into vehicle fuel. I can give you a classic example from within the East Bay Clean Cities Coalition region. We've got the ultimate landfill that waste management, sorry Steve, one of the competitors of the Republic's Republic Services. We got that project installed and it produces 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas each day and that's not a type of 13,000 gallons of fuel from trash that's producing the natural gas that's used in that vehicle, extremely low carbon content. It comes pretty close to a closed-loop scenario where the trash trucks go out. They bring trash into the landfill which then composes the fuel so those trucks can go out and get more trash. There is great promise with battery electric, need a little more work on the heavy duty side. At Clean Cities we support all alternative fuels we're not invested in one or the other. The way to be successful is to offer customers or fleet users choice and by having the full spectrum of the fuels out there that's how we achieve success. I hope I answered your questions. I can add to that Republic we have 70 latitude gas energy projects generally underway so we're doing the same thing that you mentioned about waste management. Also having worked in Coca-Cola for the last several years in the Republic I see the battery industry as very viable we're actually looking at partnering to test some of that in the refting industry now. The biggest challenge you have with the battery in this industry is the weight you add and the weight you have so when you add the weight or the battery you have to take that out somewhere. So we'll continue to look at that and I just actually met with a company last week who started some testing on some of those and wrapped up some projects to do that. I personally think it's a potentially viable technology all of electric I would make the component of all of electric we have several dozen of Coca-Cola when I was there and that's a good technology and that's a very clean technology. If I could just add real quick a comment to that so we were having a discussion about you know everybody wants to pick a winner, right? Who's going to be the winner in the long game? But at the end of the day the technology developments that have been made with battery electric and hybrid electric vehicles are pretty significant. Here's why. Because whether or not you believe that the battery electric vehicles will win the end game or not the work has been done towards electrifying all the hand-sharing components like electric air conditioning power steering power brakes so on and so on. That's enabled the auto manufacturers to take parasitic load loss off of the internal combustion engine and that will migrate over into the heavy duty trucking world and that's a monster that we haven't even addressed yet and we've got a lot of work to do in regards to that. But if you think about it though you know if you can take 45 to 70 horsepower of load loss off of the internal combustion engine that enables you to downspice that power plant make it more fuel efficient so the work is significant. Okay so we shouldn't really we shouldn't discount that and in regards to the actual battery electric vehicles themselves obviously the you know the holy grail of that it's all about energy density how much energy can you get into that and the packaging so there's a lot of work that's being done on that and I can tell you that that it's accelerating much faster than what most people think it is so in terms of the chemistry and the cost so I think what you're going to see is that that aspect of the marketplace is going to accelerate much faster than what most people think it is Good explanation and I think one of the things that it's so easy to forget too is that the more that the more work that it's done the more deployment of a whole lot of different technologies it keeps pushing the R&D forward and it helps technology developers also see that there are people that are interested in looking at different things and you better avoid in order to push the development of the technology forward so quickly some of these developments are the electrification and that is the reason after seeing it looks like nothing going on for a long time that there are now a huge storm that I think all of the side effects that we've seen on the landfill project in a lot of wastewater treatment projects is also very, very exciting because everything gets turned into Thank you Okay question clear to the back Hi, Charlie Nearle of Electric Vehicle Association I was wondering if anybody had done a comparison between the propane and natural gas electricity on an apple to apple sort of comparison dollars per mile or dollars per gallon equivalent or something like that it looks like a voluntary reasonable and I was wondering if one's ahead or is that dynamic changing as we see natural gas prices going up and down or what's the perspective in that regard has anybody done that sort of level I haven't actually done that comparison as you described but as a fleet manager that's one of our primary functions to determine total cost of ownership for vehicles the reason that I think the study that you just asked about doesn't exist in my area is I haven't made that comparison yet but there are tools online there's a total cost of ownership calculator that the Department of Energy has created it's on the alternative fuel data center website so you can kind of plug in the variables just like you described it's actually a really useful tool because it compensates by region for the cost of not just the fuels but also the electricity and then the environmental impact as well so I suggest for those numbers you head to the alternative fuel data center website I imagine that the reason we don't see studies like that how to publish is because it changes so quickly not just from year to year or from quarter to quarter but from month to month so as more interest is there you may see some published studies but it will just be all part figures if you want specifics go to the alternative fuel data center website and it shouldn't give you the answer and like I mentioned we don't prefer one fuel over the other we just present information and let the consumers kind of figure it out for themselves because what works in one area for one particular industry and right here we've got private industry we've got utility we've got a local government myself, the university what works for me in California may not work for a university kind of other part of the country may not even work for a university or a commercial fleet right in my neck of the woods other questions I have two questions of the first one related to hybrids and actually got the fuel and the second is fuel cells vehicles so I was wondering if there was any benefit of using that hybrid natural gas vehicle particularly for soft start applications in city driving and thinking adding a battery could allow you to generate great heat since the vehicle is actually heavier but maybe the battery adds too much weight so this is actually added to the measures and the second so we talked a lot about natural gas and the reason it seemed really clear I was wondering if there is any future you see for using fuel cells vehicles and particularly in a fleet application I was going to say I could take some of that I mean having worked with company I could talk a little bit about fuel cell technology and all of our partners for fuel cell technologies we went to electric and it's a good application I haven't seen anything on road yet that's worthwhile looking at at least to the test stations at this point as far as CNG and hybrid applications I agree with you I think that's a perfect application if we can control the weight issues we're currently in San Diego we're testing a hydraulic hybrid with natural gas so we're going to couple of those technologies together to get some of those dual benefits we are looking down the road about testing so electric hybrid with natural gas as well because I think that's a good benefit but right now it's just a matter of how much weight we can get off that truck before it really becomes viable for us in the industry okay let me add a real quick comment to the hybrid question so obviously you know about the mainstream OEM hybrids are manufactured but there's also some what I like to call tier one and tier two suppliers that offer aftermarket product and I know Steve has experimented with them and we're using some ourselves that the manufacturer tries to right size the battery pack and typically does exactly what you talk about where you know the battery is used essentially for launch and propulsion assist it gives you about a 20% in some cases 30% fuel economy savings it also recaptures energy and form and regenerative braking so that that form is a little I mean that term is a little confusing to some people because they say well they think the brakes are actually doing something and they're not really all you're doing is reversing the polarity of the electric motor and the motor itself creates friction as it's generating electricity to put back into the battery but we have found that it would be very effective and the one hands down thing that's been proven that nobody will argue about is it does help with the brake wear and that's pretty significant to companies like ours when you've got big trucks and a brake job on a big truck it's typically like every 18 months to two year event and you're talking in some cases from $5,000 to $10,000 to do a brake job so that is not insignificant whatsoever but I do think what you mentioned is a surprising thing to me from an OEM perspective is that you don't see more start-stop technology because it's a very world-class way to get a pretty significant amount of fuel savings so a message to the OEMs would be you know that's incorporating the technology into more vehicles and there's some things you can do to offset the weight obviously you put electric power trains on you can decrease your fuel capacity offset some of that weight interesting that here we generate a brake for the rest of the big wind in the refuge industry because we do a lot of start and stop you have residential routes with over a thousand stops on them you think about where on your brake we have some trucks that don't even go eight months before we have to rewind those brakes so that would be a big wind for us I have some good news for you also the Department of Energy Vehicle Technology is very interested in new and emerging technology this is an area that they're looking at hybrids is clearly one of the main ways to improve fuel economy and also being from the state of California the California Energy Commission is also interested in this specific application and there's some current funding opportunities right now to do some demonstration projects for heavy duty natural gas hybrids there are a couple of companies that have already stepped forward there might even be three of them getting to your fuel cell question again being in California there's a pretty aggressive plan to create the hydrogen highway there should be 61 stations out here in the near future I think the number now is closer to 20 I'm not sure exactly what it is and 2015 is the year for commercial release of fuel cell vehicles these are going to be light duty applications I'm not really sure I'm sure they can be used fuel cells can be used in fleet applications I'm just not sure about this first release of vehicles since they tend to be light duty and targeted to the consumer I suspect that fleets aren't the primary target for that initial release but the good news is commercial fuel cells are going on sale in California by 2015 which is right around the corner and who knows what all that's going to attract once things really do come into the market and I think that it's also it was really really interesting to hear your whole discussion among all of you with regard to looking at the hybridization of technology because so often I mean that's really how we do end up providing much more efficiency than you said it's more fuel that we can say it is the best of all and so often if we just look at how we can plan technologies with them all together so that we really optimize the overall benefits and reduce the way to as another added benefit to the more we are able to find some of these some of these applications I think there was a question down here go ahead good morning well friends have shown different federal incentives especially the 60 cent rebate I was wondering if you had any thoughts on incentives at the state or local level especially state life especially in state public utility commissions and what those incentives would look like Mike just to repeat the question I'm going to summarize what is the importance for significance of state incentives similar to the 50 cent alternative fuel tax credit and what would these state incentives look like I'm just going to say they're obviously important when you look at a natural gas vehicle for example they're about $30,000 for no cost and with the trash and the car truck it's about $300,000 investment so I added another 3,000 it's 10% I'll take on that so obviously any incentives we can get private business don't set those costs as welcome and we have taken advantage of those both in my role here in republic and previously at Coca-Cola where we I think over a two or three year period at Coca-Cola I think we leveraged about $30,000 to help us deploy that fleet so I think that's a big advantage and the more municipality and the government can do that that really helps spur the industry and I can echo that certainly with strong municipality government fleet and we're looking for that at the same rebate per gallon and purchase and also the state and we just got about all the tax credits we can get our goals we can bring that into another pit I think there it needs to be a combination of federal and state or local incentives it's sort of this big network of opportunities that help folks make the decision I really like the fuel tax credit but also rebates are very effective California has a very effective voucher program as well which is kind of interesting there's two schools of thought the incentive vehicle at the time of purchase and then do you offer a rebate after its purchase while California figured out which one is best because they're both extremely successful so the fuel tax incentive by yarn is really good credits I mean excuse me rebates or voucher incentives are also very effective methods and I think it needs to go a little bit farther California where we have a network of air quality management districts air pollution control districts we also have funding opportunities through our metropolitan planning organization in the Bay Area happens to be the Metropolitan Transportation Commission so you have this network of funding providers that working together can make make projects like this much easier for folks to implement but I think state and local is essential we don't want to rely on just the federal government to drive forward but it also sounds like as you said it really doesn't need to be a combination to provide the greatest effectiveness for hopefully to really move alternative fuel in today we have time for one more question if there is one okay I want to thank our panel very very much and great job in terms of providing a lot of information and really really key points that as you talk to policy makers to the public that all of these are very very important issues that help us all much better understand technology fuels the multiple benefits quite important and how they really really make sense so thank you very very much