Clean Cities PEV Discussion Group: Lessons Learned During EV Project Charging Station Installations Webinar (Text Version)

This is a text version of the video for Clean Cities PEV Discussion Group: Lessons Learned During EV Project Charging Station Installations Webinar presented on Nov. 4, 2015.

Andrew Hudgins: Good afternoon everyone. This is Andrew Hudgins with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Thanks for joining us today on this webinar.

Today we're going to be discussing the Department of Energy's Alternative Fueling Station Locator and in particular Partnerships, Progress and Future Plans

and presenting – doing the bulk of the presenting – today is Stacy Noblet with ICF International. Many of you are very familiar with Stacy and so today we're

going to take a slightly different take on talking about the Station Locator and we do a Station Locator webinar each year and we primarily take you through

functionality of the tool, how to add new stations, how to find stations, et cetera and while we'll highlight a little bit of that today, some of the new data

fields and improvements, we thought that we would like to take the time and use this opportunity to highlight some of the enhanced partnerships and outreach

and collaboration that we've undertaken in the past couple of years and especially this year.
We've had a very pointed effort with Stacy and her team to reach out to our industry partners to understand the functionality of the locator, how that's

working, what value is it providing to their stakeholders and their members and getting feedback from them on future enhancements, improvements, data fields,

et cetera. So I hope that you like the approach and the content today. We'll be doing questions and answers at the end but feel free to type those in the chat

pane and a quick note before I introduce Stacy is that if you can listen to this one of two ways, either through your computer or telephone. If you don't have

sound through your computer I'd like to recommend that you do it through the telephone and when you click that you'll see the call-in number and the passcode

in the pane. So that's enough of me. I'm going to turn it over to Stacy Noblet.
Again many of you know Stacy. She's been supporting the Clean Cities Program for a long time and really you know one of the people that can really help you

understand the critical aspect and utility that the Station Locator can provide to you. So Stacy, off to you.
Stacy Noblet: Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking some time out of your day to join us for this webinar. Like Andrew said, most people

on the line have likely heard about the Station locator and are familiar with its functionality but we wanted to give you a little bit more of a look behind-

the-scenes of how we're collaborating with industry and other various stakeholders to make sure the information in the locator is up-to-date and robust and

the interface itself is user-friendly. It's actually been almost exactly a year since the last webinar, specific to the Station Locator was held so I guess

for a quick refresher as most of you probably know the locator tracks all commercially-available EPAct-designated alternative fuels so it's E85 Biodiesel,

CNG, LNG, hydrogen, propane and of course electric-vehicle charging.
The locator does include public and private stations. The exception there is the residential fueling, which would apply to CNG and plug-in vehicles. We also

don't include multiunit dwellings if they're limited to just residents and that's mostly for electric-vehicle charging as well. We receive new information and

updates from those of the Clean Cities coordinators on the phone, stakeholders, industry publications, industry websites, various users, industry groups and

we'll talk more about that collaboration today. And then a quick rundown of our process: We do reach out to all of the existing stations in the database on

an annual basis so we're checking those at least once-a-year and the way things are going with most fuels these days it ends up being a lot more than that

because we're hearing about a lot of new stations opening or upgrades or various updates of all kinds so we're in touch with a lot of you throughout the year,

more than just that one check-in.
So to go ahead and get started I want to – just show you a quick overview. It's pretty short. It's a short webinar with a lot to cover. We do want to show you

a little bit about what's new since the last time we talked, like I said, about a year ago to get into that industry collaboration and then open it up for

questions. So what's new-and-improved? If you've been in the Station Locator lately, hopefully you've noticed some of the enhancements that the National

Renewable Energy Lab team have put in place.
The big one I wanted to mention are the increased search options so now, depending on the fuel tank that you select from the main navigation team, you have a

couple more options to then filter your results by. So for natural gas for example you can search by what type of vehicle can fit into the space at the

station, fill pressure. On the electric-vehicle charging side you can actually search by network, search by connector and outlet and we've also added

information about additional payment types, such as fleet cards. The station's data by-state, which is the – kind if you drop down from that "Locate Station"

part of the top, that's where you can see the – compilation of all the counts together and those are now broken out by public and private stations and then

the EVSE, the Electric Vehicle Charging Station are counted by location and by the number of ports. For those of you who have been kind enough to update us on

new or changes to stations, you should now receive a confirmation email, an automatic email, kind of letting you know the process that we go through. We do

confirm that information before data so it's something that's automatic so just to kind of help people out there and then one thing that we'll talk a little

bit more about today is the fact that we have additional EVSE network data coming in directly to the Station Locator.
Of course all this comes together at the same time as a really significant milestone. Hopefully you saw the news that earlier this year we surpassed 20,000

alternative fueling stations across-the-country. That includes both public and private and that growth is a big deal. It not only demonstrates your hard work

to get fueling infrastructure out there but also the collaborative relationships that we have kind of behind-the-scenes to make sure the Station Locator

captures it all and that's what we want to focus on today. The other thing I want to mention quickly is that if you've been on the locator lately searching

for propane stations in your state for example that number may look lower to you.
Have no fear. The stations are still in the locator themselves but we've worked with the industry to redefine the default search. Right now if you search by

propane and add no other filters it actually shows you stations that are primary – considered primary stations – and I'll get into that a little bit the

number itself just shows primary, the type to kind of go into the "More Search Options" to add all propane stations that are providing fuel to vehicles. This

is a quick summary of the fuel-specific fields that I kind of mentioned. Again the goal here is that depending on what fuel you're looking for you can dig a

little bit deeper rather than just kind of the basics for trying to give a little bit more information that's important to that particular industry and a lot

of these decisions have been made in collaboration with the various fuel and vehicle industries.
The next thing we're going to get into is of course a collaboration, the reason why we wanted to get everyone on the phone today, and I will ask Andrew to

kind of give us a quick overview of what we've been doing with NREL's leadership.
Andrew Hudgins: Sounds good. Thanks Stacy and we kind of wanted to highlight this because a lot of people think that Station Locator is just collecting data.

You go to a website. You submit a form. We update the data and you know we go to something else and that's not really the full picture so to make sure that

the Station Locator remains a critical tool for the alt-fuel industry and, as a side note, it's the number of most-used tool in the AFDC and of all websites

and tools in the EERE Toolbox it is Number 4.
So it's really critical that we have enhanced collaboration with all industry partners and users to make sure that the data that we are collecting is what

they need and it's provided to them in a format that is consistent with ways that they use it and consistent with new data-sharing trends, like the API's,

which we'll get into, and so again I briefly mentioned at the beginning but earlier this year we sat down with our industry partners of all the alt-fuel

groups to just talk through for three or four hours about what the locator shows and how we collect information of their interest and this slide here really

shows that stakeholder group, that collaboration is really broad so as you're talking with your stakeholders, they're really trying to get a handle on where

you fit in and how you fit in. We see the coordinators are part of our critical data providers and just collaborators to make sure that we're aware of what's

going on in your areas. So there's a lot that goes into it on the back end, collaboration-wise, and if you ever have any questions about if we're working with

Stakeholder X, Y and Z or a specific group, just reach out to us. We'd be happy to let you know if we are and what the level of collaboration looks like. So

if there's someone that's a very key stakeholder in your area and you're wondering if they've been collaborating on the Station Locator we're happy to help

with that conversation but, again, we wanted to put this in here just to give you and you know this is a nice visual to let you understand how much

coordination really goes in to making this tool what it is.
Stacy Noblet: Great. Thanks Andrew so start off with electric-vehicle collaboration and really we are lucky enough to have involvement from every aspect of