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CORWest is a highly collaborative eight-state partnership working with Clean Cities networks and state agencies. The project designs and expands the existing alternative fuel corridors with electric charging in the Intermountain West, supports electric vehicle (EV) access into high-visitation areas throughout rural America, and offers regional transportation solutions to gateway communities through public/private partnerships. The objective of the project is to increase transportation efficiency and enable widespread access to affordable alternative fuels by supporting the EV market and deploying electric vehicle service equipment (EVSE) throughout the Intermountain West.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are promising solutions for rural mobility due to lower fuel and maintenance costs. Rural areas and associated rural clusters in the United States are facing numerous challenges in adopting EVs and developing EV charging station networks due to low population density, lack of EV charging infrastructure, limited-to-no EV experience, and low consumer awareness. The objective of this project is to develop a rural EV testbed to demonstrate and evaluate the applications of EVs over a diverse range of activities, serving the rural and largely economically distressed Upper Cumberland region in Tennessee. This helps potential fleet owners and the public at large make informed decisions about EV adoption before making significant financial investments. This project serves as a proof-of-concept implementation to support knowledge gaining and transfer as well as outreach and education on EVs for rural applications. It also complements DOE's existing EV dataset with detailed EV operation and use data dedicated specifically to the challenges and needs associated with rural communities.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

While adoption of light-duty electric vehicles (EVs) has increased and more models have become commercially available, medium-duty (MD) and heavy-duty (HD) EVs have not seen the same widespread success. MD and HD EVs offer tremendous potential economic benefits to fleets and wider energy and environmental benefits to communities. This project confronts that disparity to highlight the importance and uses of MD and HD EVs. Clean Fuels Ohio designed this project to prove the operational and financial effectiveness of MD and HD EVs in fleets and communities that had not previously used this technology. Through diverse partnerships, the project utilizes commercially available EVs, electric vehicle supply equipment, facilities, and app platforms to ensure seamless technology deployment and showcase significant return on investment. As part of this project, Clean Fuels Ohio and partners operate three demonstration projects of MD and HD EVs with the goal of leading to Class 4–8 EV adoption in various fleet applications across the country.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

North Carolina and South Carolina are highly susceptible to severe weather, ranked among the top six states for hurricane occurrence by the National Hurricane Center (data for 1851 to 2010). Tropical storms and hurricanes occur frequently along their Atlantic Coast. This project engages appropriate Carolina alternative fuel vehicle stakeholders. They undertake planning, training, and implementation to create an integrated Carolina plan to employ alternative fuel vehicles in enhancing resilience during, and recovery from, infrastructure disruption. The plan helps to establish emergency procedures, training, and best practices for the diversification of, and access to, alternative fuels to expedite storm recovery, increase disruption resilience, and ensure that alternative fuel supplies are reliable during times when conventional fuel supplies are susceptible to disruption.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

Supplemental mobility services such as carsharing offer significant opportunities for benefits to rural communities. Due to low population density, lack of charging infrastructure, lack of familiarity with carsharing or electric vehicles, and longer driving distances, carsharing has not been well established in rural communities. The Clean Rural Shared Electric Mobility Project (CRuSE) introduces an all-electric carshare program in Hood River, Oregon. The carshare, consisting of five electric vehicles placed with dedicated electric vehicle charging stations at five distinct sites, helps provide access to several groups of users including city employees, affordable housing residents, tourists, and the local community population. This project will develop, demonstrate, and refine an affordable, accessible, sustainable, and replicable financial model for electric carsharing in rural Hood River, Oregon. The overall project goals of the CRuSE Project are to demonstrate that round trip electric vehicle carsharing can serve rural communities—including low-income residents—in an effective and financially sustainable way, and to develop the tools and voice to educate, encourage and replicate carsharing in other rural communities. The project team will collect a broad variety of data from users, carshare vehicles, and charging stations to assess the impact of the project on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions as well as local knowledge of electric vehicles.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

EVZion demonstrates a small-scale, environmentally sound, zero-emission, electric vehicle shuttle system through a small gateway community and the east entrance of Zion National Park (ZNP). This high-tech, electric shuttle pilot and demonstration project involves national laboratory data collection, industry partner road testing in extreme climate fluctuations, and local community leadership. This nationally recognized project is intended to support the sustainability goals of ZNP along with the economic and environmental resilience objectives of rural gateway communities. EVZion is designed for universal scalability with deployment in other high-traffic, environmentally sensitive national and state parks throughout the United States. This pilot proposes positive strategies and smart mobility solutions through the design of an electrified and resilient park touring transportation system.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

In California's Central Valley, high auto ownership costs, limited transit service, and increasing housing costs are an accessibility triple threat for low-income populations in rural communities. These residents need more affordable, clean, safe, and reliable travel modes that fill the wide accessibility gaps between existing transit service and personal vehicle ownership. Many of these residents struggle to access essential opportunities (education and jobs) and essential services (health care, recreation, and healthy food). In rural communities, high-quality transit services (fixed route and dial-a-ride) are challenging to provide because of low-density, dispersed development patterns. These conditions provide an opportunity to meet local needs with highly efficient alternative fuel vehicles. The project involves a volunteer ride program (Míoride) using electric vehicles from a local electric vehicle carsharing organization (Míocar). Volunteer drivers use the electric vehicles to provide critical rideshare services for low-income communities in rural Tulare and Kern Counties in exchange for use of the electric vehicles for their own transportation needs, demonstrating the value of these vehicles in effectively meeting the needs of rural communities. The project team is collecting operational data from the vehicles and charging stations to assess the energy efficiency of the rideshare system.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

Rural communities are disproportionately impacted by current gaps in the transportation system, which limit access to opportunities such as health care, jobs, and social services. There is also a high concentration of poor, elderly, and zero-vehicle households in rural areas. The R.O.A.D.M.A.P. project aims to better understand how advanced vehicle technologies function in these rural settings and to enhance awareness of innovative solutions with the potential to fill transportation gaps sustainably. The objective of R.O.A.D.M.A.P. is to develop, demonstrate, and refine affordable, accessible, sustainable, and replicable mobility service-enabled electric vehicle shuttle service applications in rural Appalachian Ohio. The team analyzes data from several deployments of electric and automated vehicles across transit and private vehicle operations and develops insights that inform the team's Rural Mobility Action Plan. The project includes data collection and analysis to understand the energy efficiency and greenhouse gas impacts of the electric shuttle in providing rural transportation access.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

Florida experiences the most hurricane landfalls, third most tornado events, and fifth most wildfires by acreage in the country. The objective of the project is to complete a comprehensive Statewide Alternative Fuel Resiliency Plan that utilizes multiple alternative fuels to provide redundancy, and therefore resilience, in Florida's transportation fuels. The project helps develop a best practice resiliency guide for alternative fuels for transportation as well as stationary alternative fuel generators, and documents lessons learned. The best practice guide provides insight regarding using alternative fuel vehicles as emergency response vehicles, alternative fuel supply chain strengths and weaknesses, and utilizing alternative fuel generators for emergency management facilities.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.

Rural America, representing 97% of the U.S. land area, is home to 15% of the total U.S. population. Rural trips for commuting, shopping, health care, and community-based services have become increasingly longer in the past few decades. The project develops a holistic approach to address the mobility challenges in Greene County, a typical rural county in Southwestern Pennsylvania bordering West Virginia, and this approach can be replicable to all rural counties in the United States. Key to this is developing a capability that does not now exist in the United States, namely a "Rural County Mobility Platform" (RAMP) consisting of both an online platform and phone-based system for trip reservations, structured shuttle services, volunteer management, volunteer-request matching, and mobility information dissemination. This project helps in developing methods and algorithms to pilot a new hybrid service consisting of two complementary components: a volunteer-based ridesharing system and a highly structured shuttle service (not a typical fixed route, with flag stops). It also includes a new capability for more efficient data-driven operations of the existing Greene County Transportation Program and Waynesburg University shuttle services. Ultimately, the project will improve the overall energy efficiency of the local transportation system in meeting rural transportation needs.

For more information on this project, check the Technology Integration 2020 Annual Report or Annual Merit Review presentation.