My hope for Forth Roadmap 2024: EV advocates embrace utility regulation as key to unlocking a zero-emission future

By Micheal Zimmerman and Dakoury Godo-Solo

As medium- and heavy-duty vehicles speed toward electrification, the build-out of charging infrastructure must keep pace. How utilities incorporate transportation into foundational utility functions will inform where, when, and how fast electric vehicles come online. These decisions fall mainly under the authority of state utility regulators (Public Utility Commissions) rather than transportation regulators. Therefore, advocates interested in supporting MHDV electrification should engage with PUCs in addition to more traditional advocacy avenues such as legislation.

This will be a reoccurring theme for Environmental Defense Fund this week at the Forth Roadmap Conference, where hundreds of electric transportation advocates will gather from across the nation to transform how people and goods move.

Several states have recently made headlines with statutes designed to help prepare the grid for truck and bus electrification. Since 2023:

• California and Colorado both enacted “Powering Up” bills that, among other things, require utilities to plan for future electrification needs and reduce the time they take to connect customers to the grid. Legislators in New York, Illinois and New Jersey are considering similar bills.
• Maryland enacted the DRIVE Act to spur bidirectional vehicle-to-grid charging.
• Texas passed a budget rider establishing an Interagency Task Force “to evaluate how to deploy zero-emission medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicle charging infrastructure to best support growth in that market . . . .”

These achievements are laudable, but they are not ends unto themselves. What these laws actually accomplish will be largely determined by how they are implemented at the utility regulatory level. Stakeholder input will play a critical role in shaping this implementation.

Utility regulation will only grow more important as the electricity and transportation sectors continue to converge. Historically, utilities have tended to approach transportation electrification through special programs – e.g., providing rebates and incentives, piloting new technologies and rates, and offering technical assistance – following a well-established model for utility energy efficiency programs. Such programs comprise the bulk of most utility regulators’ exposure to transportation electrification issues to date. These programs are (and will continue to be) important, but they are ancillary to utilities’ core business of delivering electric service.

This paradigm is changing. As EDF discusses in further detail in a 2024 report, “Building the Grid to Need: Best Practices for Proactively Developing Distribution Grids to Support Truck and Bus Electrification,” EVs will play a growing role in how utilities must plan, construct, and operate the grid to meet their fundamental obligation to provide safe and reliable electric service.

Utility system operators must increasingly consider characteristics of electric vehicles, including:

• Concentration of power needs. In particular, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles are expected to cluster their charging in discrete locations. This is in contrast to light-duty vehicle charging and other types of loads that tend to have a more even geographic distribution.
• The speed at which fleets seek to get interconnected. Many fleets want to interconnect in two years or less. This can be significantly shorter lead time than comparably-sized traditional loads, such as stadiums or factories, which can take years to build and thus provide longer planning and construction runways for utilities.

Indeed, each of the legislative efforts discussed earlier in California, Colorado, New York and elsewhere illustrates the growing consensus that transportation electrification is becoming a core utility issue. But legislation does not (and, as a practical matter, cannot) tackle the myriad ways in which utility planners and engineers should incorporate transportation considerations into their everyday work. Those details are necessarily left to be hashed out in the regulatory process.  

Utility regulators’ relative inexperience with transportation planning poses challenges in the near term. For example: pursuant to SB410, one of the California statutes mentioned above, the CPUC r timelines by which utilities must energize service in response to customer requests. The statute specifies that these timelines must be calibrated to enable customers to come online at a pace needed to meet California’s decarbonization and electrification targets, including state regulations to ramp up adoption of zero-emission trucks. This directive is not as simple as it may sound. Translating transportation decarbonization targets into utility energization timelines requires a detailed examination of where, when, and how vehicles operate. Such analysis falls outside utility regulators’ traditional wheelhouse. Possibly as a consequence, the CPUC struggled to incorporate California’s transportation goals into their initial timelines, and instead adopted targets based on past utility performance. (EDF has urged the CPUC to take a deeper dive in the next phase of that proceeding.)

Despite the need to work through detailed transportation considerations with utility regulators, relatively few transportation advocates tend to join PUC proceedings. PUC proceedings can be complex. How to participate in them is beyond the scope of this blog post. However, if you are a transportation advocate and would like to learn more about getting involved, please reach out to the EDF at the emails below — or connect with us at Forth this week.  

It’s vital that utilities and their regulators hear from transportation advocates at this early stage in policy development. And with the wave of proceedings coming that can shape the build-out of MHDV charging infrastructure, advocates have a critical opportunity to educate utility regulators now.

Micheal Zimmerman will be speaking at the Forth Roadmap panel, “Yes We Can! Behind the Headlines of US Grid Challenges – Progress on the Energize Agenda” on Tuesday, September 24th at 1:00 – 4:00 PM EDT. You can reach Michael at mzimmerman@edf.org .

Dakoury will be speaking at the Forth Roadmap panel, “Scaling Utility Investments” on Thursday, Sept. 26th at 1:15 – 2:30 PM EDT. You can reach Dakoury at dgodosolo@edf.org .