SAN DIEGO — Utility regulators are confronting myriad challenges in dealing with the growing need for electric vehicle chargers, including a quickening pace of obsolescence, a lack of uniform standards among charging stations, and lingering questions about who should deploy and pay for equipment.

And any meaningful response to those challenges will likely fall to the states, according to Phil Jones, executive director of the Alliance for Transportation Electrification (ATE) and a former member of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission.

“It appears to be a decision of the federal government not to do anything on climate and perhaps not even renew the EV tax credits,” Jones said during a July 18 panel on “future proofing” EV charging technology at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ Summer Policy Summit. “The issues are going to be squarely in your laps in the states. That’s my prediction over the next three to four years, at least.” 

Following is some of what we heard during the panel.

Future Proofing Explained

Panel moderator Jamie Barber, director of the energy efficiency and renewable energy unit at the Georgia Public Service Commission, opened the discussion by pointing to a key problem utility commissions face in future proofing utility EV infrastructure investments.

“The regulatory process is often so long that by the time the commission approves a program or plan, the technology may already be out-of-date. So the question is, how should the commission plan for these short-lived assets?” Barber said.

“What does future proofing actually really mean?” said Marie Steele, vice president of electrification and energy services at NV Energy (NYSE:BRK.A). “When I think about it from a utility perspective, it’s very easy for us when we think about how to operate the greatest critical infrastructure that has reliability metrics around it. We focus on standardization; we focus on interoperability; we focus on reliability — also with that center of the customer experience. And grid integration is layered on top of it.”

NV Energy is allowed to own EV charging stations in Nevada, Steele noted, giving customers a choice of who can operate their sites: the utility, third-party providers or the customers themselves.

The utility previously took a “top-down” approach to encouraging development of charging sites by providing incentives. “‘Just do the best you can with moving the market’ was really how we designed our programs,” Steele said.

But with the approval last year of its $100 million Economic Recovery Transportation Electrification Plan, NV Energy is now taking a more “bottom-up” approach to developing charging sites, according to Steele. The plan is expected to produce 1,882 chargers at 120 sites across the state. (See NV Energy Gets Green Light for $100 MW EV Charger Plan.)

Under the new approach, NV Energy starts by developing site profiles with an eye to standardizing the charging network within utility’s entire service territory while determining cost estimates for each site “irrespective of ownership model.”

“So we want to have the standardization there and know what the project is going to cost,” Steele said. “And then when we get to interoperability, which is also still reliability and standardization, we have another long list of requirements for infrastructure that will be incentivized or owned by NV Energy.”

Those include minimum power levels, secure communications protocols and customer payment requirements.

“All of this so as to make sure that we can connect it into the grid, right? So that it benefits not just that individual EV driver or businesses that host EV charging stations. We can also optimize grid integration. That’s to the benefit of everybody,” she said.

‘Anchoring’ with Fleets

“We have a lot of clean energy assets, and one of the core principles we are trying to bring to this industry is the lessons learned from the solar and wind industry and apply those lessons to the scalability of [EV] infrastructure,” said Suresh Jayanthi, a senior director of sales and business development in the mobility solutions division at NextEra Energy Resources (NYSE:NEE).

For NextEra, that includes a technology-agnostic approach to the design and construction of EV charging sites and bringing finance and operations groups together to provide charging energy as a service to customers.

“This similar perspective for infrastructure will be critical as we look at all the variables that we just heard, figuring out the design [and] permit considerations, [and] bringing those into a platform that gives us predictable deliverables in terms of the time it takes to get through the interconnection and all the issues associated with that,” Jayanthi said.

Jayanthi, who currently focuses on developing charging solutions for medium- and heavy-duty vehicle fleets, said it’s important for the power industry to remember that fleet operators want to focus on what they do best, such as delivering packages on time.

“They’re not out to become infrastructure experts. They’re not trying to figure out how to build charging stations and figure out how to manage energy cases. We are trying to remove some of those bottlenecks, so as they look at electrification, their focus is on using the infrastructure as an enabler rather than a bottleneck. And that’s been our focus,” he said.

NextEra believes that its experience in developing fleet charging can provide lessons for a broader charging strategy.

“While consumer vehicle infrastructure is a critical enabler for the broad-based adoption of electric vehicles, fleets can provide a unique anchoring point around which we can look at infrastructure scaling, and it could have a multiplier effect,” Jayanthi said.

‘Right-sizing’ vs. Future Proofing

ATE’s Jones recounted a recent conversation with his daughter, who works as a legislative analyst in Washington’s capital, specializing in broadband policy.

“When I told my daughter I was going to be speaking about future proofing in San Diego … she says, ‘Dad, there’s no such thing as future proofing. How can you proof the future? There’s always going to be uncertainty,’” Jones said.

“I prefer the term ‘right-sizing for the future,’ or something like that. So what you’re trying to do is right-size the conduit, the pipes, the asphalt, concrete, transformers [and] switchgear,” he said. “You’re trying to get the right set of equipment in that first phase that can scale without the risk of stranded assets.”

Jones offered a list of recommendations for state regulators, including:

• creating a transportation electrification (TE) plan;
• finding a way to bring stakeholders (such as truckers) into the process so they can describe where their industries are going;
• encouraging utilities to have a single point of contact on TE issues;
• developing an interconnection review process for TE projects;
• offering incentives and rebates, which should be revisited often;
• encouraging utilities to frequently change their approved product lists to accommodate new companies coming into the EV space; and
• looking around for best practices from across the country.

And with the longer curve of adoption for EVs, Jones also encouraged commissioners to consider allowing utilities to employ multiyear rate plans to recover costs from EV equipment.

“I know that consumer advocates and [the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates] and others may not be fans of this, but in order to bring the right-sizing of this technology and do least-cost planning for the long term, you may need to do that,” Jones said.