The vision of an electric vehicle revolution in the US faces numerous speed bumps, barriers and detours.

Among them are widespread failures at public charging stations, long waits for utilities to connect new charging sites, a power grid in need of upgrades, EV sticker prices that remain out of reach for many individuals and organizations, vexing battery supply chains and lagging coordination between utilities, carmakers and equipment suppliers.

Unless removed, such obstacles could block America's mobility metamorphosis, undermining President Joe Biden's ambition for EVs to make up half of all new vehicle sales by 2030, power grid and EV experts acknowledged at the Forth Roadmap Conference, held May 15–17 in Portland, Ore.

"We have to be better prepared than we are today," Britta Gross, director of transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), said during an interview on the sidelines of the symposium.

Gross is concerned that the current electric transportation "euphoria" could dissolve into finger-pointing and inaction. "It worries me that we will not have the sustained commitment [from] federal government, state governments, battery manufacturers, automakers [to] sustain this for seven more years to get to even some of the 2030 numbers," Gross said.

Gross and others did emphasize their commitments to see through an effective merger of electricity and transportation sectors centered on decarbonization.

"With any meaningful transition, there's going to be challenges," Hannon Rasool, director of the fuels and transportation division at the California Energy Commission (CEC), said during a panel discussion. "Complaining is easy. Finding reasons not to do things is easy. But solving problems can be hard, and it's going to be rewarding and worthwhile."

Sales of battery electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles have grown strongly in recent years, rising to roughly 7% of total US light-duty vehicle sales in 2022 from less than 2% in 2019, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights and S&P Global Mobility.

With the prospect of much higher rates of EV adoption just around the corner, organizations such as the CEC and EPRI are stepping up their efforts to close infrastructure gaps.

The Energy Commission, California's primary energy policy planning agency, approved a $2.9 billion investment plan in December 2022 to help the Golden State meet its goal of phasing out sales of new conventional gasoline-powered passenger vehicles by 2035. EPRI, a nonprofit energy research group whose board of directors includes CEOs of many of the nation's largest power companies, plans to start an aggressive three-year initiative in June to help brace the grid for multitudes of new electric cars, buses and trucks, including increasingly powerful models.

"The board recognized more than a year ago that the utility industry needed to be even more prepared for the onslaught of load that's coming, especially as the trucking loads are starting to show up," said Gross, who previously directed General Motors Co.'s advanced vehicle commercialization policy and led the mobility practice for the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute.

'Frame the problem'

The EPRI initiative, dubbed EVs2Scale2030, seeks to rally utilities and their regulators to align with vehicle manufacturers, fleet operators, charging station specialists and other stakeholders on how to support a 50% EV market share by 2030.

The scale of that growth, including potentially 500,000 public chargers to serve tens of millions of EVs, "requires stakeholders acting together as never before," Gross said.

The effort's first focus is to "frame the problem," according to Gross, by taking an unprecedented deep dive into anticipated EV power demand, grid and workforce needs as well as the cost and lead times required to build new infrastructure.

"So what happens when all trucks are electrified, when all light-duty vehicles are electrified? How big is the problem from a load aspect so that we know what we're designing for on a [distribution] feeder level?" Gross said.

In answering those questions, EPRI will leverage its expertise in analyzing the impacts of distributed energy resources on the grid to determine just how much EV charging specific areas of the system can host without affecting reliability.

"It's the only way you can count how many transformers you need, or what's the nature of the upgrade," Gross said.

EPRI will detail the findings in a national road map.

To pay for grid upgrades, Gross believes that a new federal program might be needed to augment the nearly $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure initiative, authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. Separately, investor-owned utilities in the US are poised to spend over $4 billion to build the underlying charging infrastructure and accelerate EV adoption, according to the Edison Electric Institute.

But rural electric cooperatives and municipal utilities serving remote areas lack the ability to "peanut butter smear" rate increases for grid-side upgrades across a large customer base, Gross said.

The EPRI initiative also will focus on possible regulatory and standards reforms to deploy, operate and maintain EV charging infrastructure on a massive scale, as well as tools and pilot projects to build further momentum.

'A pretty good application'

As EPRI's effort begins, cross-sector collaborations and business model innovations are multiplying in search of opportunities.

Renewable energy heavyweight NextEra Energy Resources LLC, an affiliate of NextEra Energy Inc., is working with Daimler Trucks North America LLC and BlackRock Alternatives on a joint venture of more than $650 million. Recently branded as Greenlane, the JV is focused on public charging for big rigs.

"It's very early days, but the ambition is to essentially create truck stops all along the interstate highway system," Steve Gutmann, public sector sales manager at NextEra Mobility, said during a panel in Portland. "What we're trying to do is innovate and develop business models to accelerate medium- [and] heavy-duty electrification."

Massachusetts-based Highland Electric Transportation Inc. is rolling out electric school buses under a subscription model that allows customers to avoid the high up-front cost of diesel alternatives.

"The average height of a diesel exhaust pipe on a school bus is right around the average height of a second-grader," Matt Stanberry, vice president of market development at Highland Electric Fleets, said during an interview in Portland. "I think this is a pretty good application [of electrification]."

So far, the company has over 330 electric school buses under subscription with school districts. Stanberry compares Highland Electric Fleets' business model to that of residential solar leasing, which helped to make rooftop solar more accessible to those who could not afford to buy a system up front. The subscription model has taken off among other electric truck and bus companies as well, including upstarts Zeem Solutions Inc. and Forum Mobility Inc.

Working with utilities to bring power into multi-megawatt bus depots has been a positive experience, according to Stanberry.

"Our relationship with utilities is symbiotic," Stanberry said. "They generally like to electrify things."

Highland Electric Fleets has used its buses in utility vehicle-to-grid programs in Massachusetts and Vermont, providing peak power from bus batteries during the summertime.

"They're school buses first and foremost," Stanberry said. "But because they are big batteries, because the dwell times are so long, they really can serve other important community functions as well."

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