Name: Wheels & Watts: Powering EV Charging for Educational Institutions
Uploaded: 2025-06-24T19:16:06.986Z
Duration: 1 h 4 min 36 s
Description: Wheels & Watts: Powering EV Charging for Educational Institutions

Transcript for "Wheels & Watts: Powering EV Charging for Educational Institutions": Buddy, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us at this for this Wilson Watts session, powering EV charging for educational institutions. We have an excellent program for you all today, and I continue to see people joining. Welcome. Welcome, everybody. We're gonna give it a few more seconds to let people join. And if you get a chance, on the right side of your screen, there's a chat feature, and we would love to hear from you, the city that you're joining from and the name of your school or your organization. So please add it in the chat. It's always helpful for us to know who is joining us, so please enter that information. We're gonna give it a few more seconds. Excellent. Hi, Dennis. Hi, Dale. Hi, Robert. Hi, everybody. Kate. Alright. So as people start adding where they're calling from, we're just gonna get started and write get right on it. So for today's webinar, we have a great set of speakers, and the overarching goal is to share with you how an investment in sustainability attracts talent, serve staff and students, and positions your organization as a leader. And we have an excellent agenda today. We're gonna be talking about the benefits of workplace EV charging, big picture, and then we're gonna bring it down to educational institutions with two excellent case studies from Hudson Valley Community College and the College of NJ. We're also gonna be talking about, technologies and the right stations for your needs. Also, tax credits, grants, and rebates to help you save money on cost, lowering purchasing cost and then getting some excellent credits. We're also gonna talk about installations and strategies. And finally, we're gonna talk about two excellent programs that are, sponsored by the Department of Energy called Charge at Work and EVAL certification. And this is, the line of speakers at the top is me, I'm from Plug In America, and I'm really excited to work with you all. Everybody's gonna introduce themselves, so, let's just keep moving. And I also wanna say that as I mentioned, eval certification or e d adoption leadership is one of the sponsors of this webinar series, and I'm excited to share that Aplo in America is is eval bronze certified. And, my colleague Lisa will share a little bit more about that in, at the end of presentation. So before we begin, we always like to give a little bit of a of a poll just to see how knowledge of people. So let's see. And, also, to get a sense if people aren't driving EVs. So do you or your colleagues or your colleagues drive an electric vehicle? So I invite you all to vote. Alright. That was a a little quick, but oops. Let me see. Just moving on the slides. Alright. So just so you know, transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in The US, and this is based on a twenty year inventory conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency. So as you can see on the screen, transportation, is at the top, but not only is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, it's only the only sector with rising emissions, which is why there is right now so many programs and, advancement of technologies to minimize emissions from light, medium, and heavy duty vehicles. And when we're talking about light duty vehicles, we know that in the last ten years, EV driving has an upward trend. For instance, in 2024, a record of 1,300,000 EVs were sold. And thanks to EVs, we were able to lower the purchasing prices of these vehicles. And, also, we know that the majority of EV drivers charge at home. However, there's a significant percentage of Americans who don't have access to home charging because of many reasons, and particularly because they likely live in an apartment complex, multifamily complex, and they just don't have a garage. So not having home charging for many people has become the primary barrier, to charging, to driving EVs. However, public spaces and worksites, organizations of different sizes and types can open access to EV charging. Nevertheless, public charges is still a little bit unreliable. We've been doing a lot of inventory nationwide, and we know that even though that we've been moving the needle still, 20% of public charges are broken in The US. Also, pricing is all over the place. So for instance, there's different pricing rates. There's different pricing, payment modes. You can pay with a debit card, or sometimes you need a membership. Sometimes you need, a chip card. So it it can be a little bit difficult. We're definitely getting better, but it's public charging is still not the most reliable, which is giving us workplace charging as a great opportunity to increase increase access to reliable EV charging. And workplaces can be a primary charging or secondary charging location depending if a person has charging at home. And since we know that most of Americans, around 73% of American commuters strive to work, park their vehicles for multiple hours a day, workplace charging can be a very reliable place to charge your electric vehicle. Another, as we're projecting the number of EVs on the road, we know that we're going to need 1,300,000 of workplace charging stations to, meet the need of 26,000,000 EVs on US roads by 2030. So that was just a little overview of the importance of, reliable charging and workplace charging. So what now we're gonna talk to, we're gonna talk with Chris McNally from Hudson Valley Community College. Chris, please join us on the stage. Now let's please introduce yourself. Okay. Hello. My name is Chris McNally. I am the department chair of applied technologies at Hudson Valley Community College. We're in Upstate New York, Troy, New York, and we have a second campus about a half an hour north of there in Malta, New York. My department covers a lot of the areas that were typically considered to be trades areas. So automotive is one of my largest and we have six separate automotive programs including a degree program, a two year associates degree program in electric vehicles and also a certificate program in electric vehicles for professional technicians looking to add EVs to their resume. I also have the electrician training program and our over overhead line worker program. And that's really where the the bulk of the work that I've been doing has been recently is crossing the line between those two in the EV charging realm. So we're training technicians to fix the electric vehicles. We're also training electricians and line workers to provide power to the, vehicle charging. So it it just made sense that we should be getting involved in electric vehicle charging systems. So EVSE, installation and repair and service. So that that's been a a large focus for the college in general. Just a little background on the college. So some statistics. Again, we're in New York Capital District. I like to tell people if you look in New York City and you think about traveling to Montreal, we're about halfway. So it's a great place to stop for lunch and then I stop and visit us. So New York's Capital District, our main campus is in Troy, New York, and then we have a a smaller campus half an hour north in Malta, New York. We have a total head count of 9,000 students. Our full time equivalency hovers around 14,500. We also serve a large number of, colleges and high schools, so that really brings the numbers up. But we also have 650 employees. So there are a lot of people on our campus at all times of the day, going into the nights with our night classes and also weekends. And we're seeing a significant number of these people either driving electric vehicles or looking to become electric vehicle owners. And so back in 2020, the initiative was to install EV charging to attract employees and to also retain employees to to give them that service. Just as a personal note, I have a very good friend of mine that I've worked with at the college for probably twenty five years now. He would no longer be working at the college if it wasn't for the electric vehicle charges that we have. He has a significant drive, and he bought, an electric vehicle. He bought a Nissan LEAF, and he drives about an hour and fifteen minutes each way. So he'll drive to campus. He'll plug in his car. By the end of the day, it's fully charged and he drives it and he goes home and he, plugs it in at night. And he has told me that he would not work at the college if it wasn't for the availability of electric vehicles. And, you know, he he's a close friend of mine, so I'm biased, but this is a person who would be a tremendous loss to the college if he left. I also am an EV driver, and I appreciate having the charging system on campus. I know a number of my fellow faculty members who have specifically bought their electric vehicles because the colleges made it possible for them to charge. So we have a large number of people and and a significant number of them are seriously interested in having electric vehicles and having the access to charge them. Currently and and these numbers are are changing rapidly. So we have, actually 28 charging stations between the two campuses that are available to our faculty members, our employees, and our students. These are charging stations that they have to pay for, so it it it's not given by the college. Obviously, no college can really afford to do that long term, but we do have them available and, you know, through lynkwell. So it it's, I'll put in the plug. I personally love the lynkwell system. I have all the apps on my phone, because this is what I do. I deal with electric vehicles and lynkwell, in my opinion, has been the most useful and user friendly of them all. So I'm glad that's what we have on campus. In addition to that, we also have our own private charging network that we use for our vehicles on campus. Those are not available to students. You can see a couple of our charging stations here. So we have them in our our parking garage. We also it's a large campus, so we have them spread out across the campus. And one of the things that we're working on is converting our fleet on campus to electric vehicles. So you can see the first public safety vehicle that we bought, the Mustang Mach e, which I know the, the public safety people were really disappointed to get a Mustang as their first EV. They've gotten a a couple of Nissan LEAPS after that, and they're they're not quite as popular as the Mustang for driving around campus. But this is a perfect solution for any college because you think that the majority of time your your vehicles are on campus, they're they're not driving very far and, you know, this is perfect for an electric vehicle. So our public safety is in the process of converting in our physical plant. As we replace our trucks, we're going to be investigating electric vehicles for those, replacement vehicles. We are in the process of applying for our EVAL status and our goal is to go for platinum. This is something when we learned about EVAL, it was absolutely essential for Hudson Valley to do this. We like to think of ourselves as one of the leading institutions when it comes to electric vehicle, education and service. So having this this status, being certified EVAL status is absolutely essential for us at Hudson Valley Community College. And a large part of that is because we are training people to do this work, to install these, chargers, to maintain those chargers. See here a picture of the training lab that we assembled and, you know, this is an automotive lab, but if you look, you can see we've got utility poles in the background. We got transformers. We've got our our Lynkwell, DC fast charger here. We've got a number of level two chargers. We're teaching the people who are going to install and maintain these systems. So it's crucial for us to be EVAL certified. Just a little plug for what we're doing. We're spending a lot of time working with, doing our training for grants. We have an ATE grant through NSF where we are developing curriculum for electric vehicle charging. So if anybody has any interest in getting that kind of information, we are always more than happy to share it. Currently, we have training going on. We're training all of the automotive instructors in the high schools in New York State on electric vehicles. That is happening right now. So we started yesterday, so the high school, instructors are coming to three locations in New York for this training. And that is through the, New York Power Authority and also through the US Department of Labor. I'm gonna pass it on right now. I I think I've sent more than my fair share, so I'll pass it along. Hello. My name is my name is Paul Romano. I'm the sustainability officer for the College of NJ. We are located in I could suggest we might be another lunch destination, when traveling between New York and Philadelphia. We're about 60 miles from New York, about 30 miles, from Philadelphia, in the Princeton Trenton kind of metro area. We are very, as an institution, we first installed chargers on campus back in 2014. So I would suggest that we were early adopters, but more recently replaced those same chargers, with network chargers and have dealt in to, in a more robust way, an enthusiastic way about expanding our capacity here, on campus. So a little bit about, the College of NJ. Our objective is, yes, certainly to provide an amenity to our community and or members of our community, but more broadly, towards the goal of decarbonization. So the College of NJ had established a goal of being carbon neutral by 2040, and the way we pursue all technologies or consider all technologies is through the lens of demand and supply, trying to accomplish that in the most efficient manner possible. I think that'll be helpful context, as we explain some of our current projects and and why we've chosen to proceed as we have. So the College of, New Jersey, it's about a 300 acres. It's, what I'll call a kind of a suburban campus. It's one of, approximately eight state, institutions here in New Jersey within the higher ed's, system. We are approximately 7,500 full time students, which sounds equivalent to to, Hudson Valley. It's also similar to our neighbor here, Princeton. We have 40 buildings. By contrast, Princeton has 400 buildings. So we are, we we are very, let's say, energy dense, energy intensive, facility here on campus with, lots of community members. We, like many campuses, historic campuses, built around the turn of the century, produce most of our own power here on campus, anywhere between 8085% of our own electricity. And most all of our buildings are on a thermal district providing both heating and cooling, providing about 90% of the load of those buildings. We produce that electricity, I'm, proud to to to declare, at about half the cost of what it would, what the expense would be from to take it from the grid and that lower emissions than our local grid. So we're very eager to kind of expand the capacity of that, but it does kind of impose its own challenges when it comes to EV adoption, which we can delve into. So, we've had this, have been engaged in a series of sustainability initiatives around transportation. But I should say that it's more broad than just EVs. Yes. EVs are part of the solution, but we love to get people out of their cars, onto bikes. Anything we can do to support bikes and pedestrians as well, to reduce the number of trips when possible. And we are pursuing several kind of broad initiatives, right here that are largely specific to New Jersey at this time. Again, primarily focused on decarbonization as the goal. So we have about a 110 vehicles in our fleet. That includes public safety, our our maintenance teams, our recreation, all the like. We've articulated a plan here by which we intend to get to carbon neutrality. We have two different paths here on the graph that is shown. We do that by two primary needs. We do this not only through the adoption of electric vehicles, but we also do or incorporate a strategy that we call rightsizing vehicles. So when possible, we try to adopt vehicles that suit the task at hand. So as pictured here, we have a series of what we like to refer to as our ice cream trucks, right, which have taken the place of heavier, highway, you know, high speed vehicles, such as vans around campus. They're a lot less intrusive, and they are suitable for level one charging. So it allows us to adopt them at scale quickly without necessarily having to provide all the infrastructure you may need of, EVs or larger EVs, I should say. So we have three sites, here on campus, that represent three phases of construction. This first phase that we recently completed was the replacement of, EV chargers that were originally installed in 2014. We did not impose any fees for their use. They were not network. They were not intelligent. We couldn't manage demand. We couldn't readily manage the users. And as you might imagine, that caused a a little bit of squabbling, amongst our users. And so, you know, moving up to network charges was a great benefit to us. We have, and and I'll show you the results of that momentarily. And then, we also have two subsequent phases, one which we're referring to as our fleet phase, which, hopefully, will get started in the fall of this year, and in the subsequent year, a tourism phase. Both of those are, so named because they're, intended for different users. One is, our own use, particularly our public safety and maintenance teams, which as, Chris remarked, you know, our vehicles have rarely leave the campus. And then the other is actually intended here in New Jersey to support what they refer to as, you know, the tourism industry at large, and what they refer to as tourism corridors to ensure that we have EV charging, along the length of anyone who may be visiting the state. Those are supported by three separate funding programs here in New Jersey through our Board of Public Utilities and other we like to stack our incentives, with other available funds. They're listed here on the slide. In the interest of time, I'm gonna keep moving. And then we also host events like, EV shows here on campus and demonstrating our technology to those who are interested. And then finally, I wanna show you, just very quickly, a dashboard for our, EV station management, which I think is quite interesting because it lapses from last semester, and I'm referring to the fall semester, and the most recent spring semester when we started to impose fees for the use of our charging stations. And what's quite interesting to me, I can't I must admit it wasn't anticipated, is we still have the same number, if not greater users of these stations. We are generating more revenue after we'll impose fees. And, so it's it's been a great success, and I'm not hearing squabbling, I was referring to, amongst users about why is this person loitering in the spot unnecessarily when I'm desperate for charge. So, all of these have been great developments for the college. I'll leave a few others to to delve into the details. That's awesome to hear about, Paul. Thank you so much for sharing. Hi, everybody. My name is Kate Kruk. I'm the partner and engagement director with Lynkwell EV Charging, located in Upstate New York. I have been an e v driver since 2015, and I'm excited to share a little bit about today about hardware and software selections that meets your needs for your campus. As a parent with two kids that have gone through the college campus tours, I also appreciate what a lot of the universities and colleges across the country are doing to include e v charging as part of their campus makeup. Because for families like mine who drive electric vehicles, it's great to have that amenity on campus. And to some, it's no longer an amenity. It's something that is definitely needed to put you ahead of competition or also to make it sure that your staff and your students have access to twenty first century technology. So the first thing I want to talk about really quick today because it looked like from the beginning poll as a lot of people are e v drivers here on the call today, so that is awesome. And for those of you who don't drive e v yet, this might be some new information. But it's really important to kind of wrap your head around some of the lexicon that we use in the EV world so that you can choose the right tools for the job. So first thing you wanna do before you start any program and put e v charging in your in your parking lots, in your school communities, is find out what is the need, what is in your parking lot. So when we talk about hybrid vehicles, I wanna point out that hybrid vehicles don't have a plug. They have dual engines, and they're actually the combustion engine is, and an electric motor moves forward. So, therefore, there's no plug. There's no need for a charging station in a standard hybrid vehicle. Plug in hybrid vehicles, and I mentioned this language too because it's gonna come up in grants and funding. But plug in hybrid vehicles or PHEVs offer drivers the use of using a fuel as well as a plug. So they have combustion engines plus electric motors, and the battery recharges during deceleration or when it's plugged in. So it moves it moves a little bit, farther. And then finally, my personal favorite is the zero emission vehicle, that 100% electric vehicle, z e v, d e v. There's so many acronyms in the e v world, but those zero emission vehicles are 100% powered by electricity. And that's gonna mean that they need to be fueled via a plug or a charging station in order for them to get to where you need to go. Why this is important is because the type of vehicle needs to match the types of charging stations in order to be efficient. So couple things with charging stations, and I think you already heard, both Paul and Chris talk about the chargers that are in their locations, is there's level one, two, and three charging station. So level one is a basic home charging generally home charging, but it can be used for out in public, and that's a one ten outlet. So, yes, you can plug in your electric vehicle into a wall socket. Is it gonna charge? Yes. Is it gonna take a long time? Also, yes. So level one chargers are good for, plug in hybrid vehicles as well as your battery electric b h e v's, fully hybrid fully electric vehicles. That level one charging is gonna take, give you about three to five miles of range every hour, so it can take seventeen to twenty five hours to charge your vehicle. Is it the most efficient? Maybe not. But does it work in a pinch? Absolutely. Second, we've already heard about a little bit today is that level two charging, and that's kind of the sweet spot when it comes for campus charging. Level two charging delivers anywhere from 2.8 up to 19.2 kilowatts of power. So what that really means is it can deliver anywhere between twelve and eighty miles of of range every hour. So it typically takes anywhere from three to eight hours to fully charge a vehicle. So some place like a campus where students gonna be there for a good majority of the day for your as a workplace charging when you're at work eight hours, absolutely. It makes a great, great sense. And like the level one, two, and three charging stations, the price point for each one of those chargers kind of follows that same suit. Level one being the most, affordable, and then level three charging stations tend to be a little bit, more increasing cost because of the larger unit. Level three charging stations when it comes to campuses and schools might make sense for you, especially in those tourism quarters like Paul had discussed, because a level three charger can deliver anywhere between 300 or excuse me, 500 to 350, sometimes up to kilowatts of power, terawatts of cow power for, semi trucks. That range added is about 75 to a 100 miles every hour, and it can take 20 to 20 up to, nearly twenty minutes to charge most electric vehicles that are currently on the road. Those e v those DC fast chargers are level three chargers again do come at a cost, but they do have that more of a gas station mentality where it's that quick turnaround to get your charge or your vehicle fully charged up. One thing I do want to point out is those level three chargers might not necessarily work with the vehicles that are on your campus. So do be careful, for most plug in hybrid vehicles, those PHEVs, something like your RAV four hybrid, for example. Those kinds of vehicles do not charge on a level three charger. The batteries are too small, and the power that's coming in from a level three charger doesn't isn't compatible with those batteries. So when you're choosing vehicles, especially for your fleet, you wanna make sure that your vehicles match the type of charger. And, most importantly, as as we as most of us are educators here on this call today is we wanna work smarter, not harder. And I appreciate Chris, shouting out the lynkwell software, but you do wanna make sure that the software solution that is attached to the hardware that you're using to plug your chart to use to plug in your chargers. The software solutions, there's different things that you can use to, to benefit your community. You could offer things through software solutions like private charging, which restricts access to approved drivers. So, for example, you can use software to say, this is only for your employees to use, and your employees might have a code so that they can charge over on certain stations where students can charge on others. There's driver discounts where you can set custom pricing for different user groups. For example, you can send your employees a discount so that they can charge for free, where maybe people who are coming from out of town, maybe, like, at Hudson Valley when there's a ballgame going on at night, if you wanna charge guests who are coming to the ballgame full price and visitors, who are your employees zero price, you can do that through software. You can also set energy and time limits to promote fair access. We also we know that sometimes you can't put in a lot of chargers all at once. You might not have the capacity, or you, you might not want to do it all at once because of budget constraints. You can make those chargers turn off after two hours of charging, for example, by using software. Load management is another really popular feature that you can consider using within certain softwares. BioLINK offers it. But, again, check with your provider when you're doing projects, like EV charging. So load management means you can put in more charging ports without increasing the utility infrastructure. And then what you do is you manage, the the capacity that you do have amongst the vehicles that are charging in, at the time of charge. And then finally, you can create customized network. So if you, wanna make the University of California's brand of charging stations, you can use the customized software to offer that to your community. But another thing that's really important when it comes to EV charging projects is how to maximize your savings. And this is something that as an EV driver and a and a solution provider, I always like to be able to point out that there's a lot of ways that you can minimize your out of pocket expenses, and not go crazy trying to do it. So right now, there are still federal tax credits for infrastructure. So I'm gonna put that in the chat in just a moment, but there are federal tax credits that you can use. Thank you, Stanfa, out there as well. There's also utility grants and state grants. And as Paul mentioned, you're able to stack a lot of these grants and funding opportunities to continue to decrease your out of pocket expenses. Of course, you can also use part, partnerships and cost sharing. Cooperative purchasing, I'm gonna talk about in just just a moment. You can use that energy management software that I just spoke about about how you can now manage what you have in the ground so that you don't incur additional costs once the charging station's there. Of course, you can charge your drivers. There's nothing saying that you have to provide this opportunity, to folks within your community for free. So, again, using your software, using your setup, you can make sure that you set a charging rate, something that you actually charge your drivers to cover your utility costs. Oops. And I've gotta move to the next slide here. This is a great resource. I will a 100 toot my own horn on this one, but finding incentives, you can utilize the Lynkwell website. This is free to use for anybody. So I encourage everyone because the incentive, market has been changing significantly, over the past couple months. This tool, find incentives, you can use, and it's updated within twenty four hours of a of a change. So it's very current, almost as it's current as you're gonna get. So this program allows you to type in the site location of where your school, your community is, the type of charger that you're looking for because there's different grants and funding based on the type of charger level one, two, and three. And I will tell you that most, if not all of the funding, is geared towards level two and level three charging stations. Those level ones are often left out of funding opportunities just in case that is something you were considering. If you know your utility company, that website, that data form is going to ask you for the utility company. It's also gonna know ask if you are a known DAC disadvantaged community or environmental justice community, also known as justice forty communities. That is important for a lot of grant funding, and you can toggle yes or no. It's also gonna ask you the type of driver access. If this is gonna be a public charging location or if this is gonna be private or for some instances, if it's gonna be a mixed use. And then the use case. Is this workplace charging? Is it fleet? Is it multi unit? Once you put in all the information that you know about your site, it's gonna kick you back the rebate finder, and it's gonna give you a list of everything that you are eligible for based on that information. So it's a great way to start to see what kind of grant is out there. It will also show you a range of the incentive funding opportunity. So if it's between a thousand dollars and $5,000 a port, for example, it's a great way to start your journey to figure out how you can save money right off the rip before you start a program. And this is something that, the Lynkwell team will help you out with if you're interested in learning more, or if you do do that search on your own and you're interested in diving deeper into the the nitty gritty of those pieces of information, I have a funding team here who's always help, happy to help you, navigate those that information that's available. Finally, for most in the education world, if you are an education facility, a government you a government agency, or a non for profit, there's even more ways to save funding by using cooperative purchasing. I can tell you Sourcewell tips, and PCA and state contracts will also help you reduce prices and also get your charging station project in the ground sooner because you don't have to go through, certain types of processes. You can go right to this these contracts that are already negotiated and then move forward with with your project with negotiated pricing, which is generally 20 to 30% less than your standard price. With that, now that you know a little bit about the different products, the different hardware, the different software, turn it over to my friend George from Brian Electric who's gonna tell you a little bit more about getting those chargers in the ground and up and running. So, George Yeah. Take it away. Thank you, Kate. So I am gonna move quick because I do wanna make sure everyone has some time to offer some questions. So in in a nutshell, when you are setting up your project for EV charging stations, the first thing is obviously setting up that consultation, talking with me or your electrical contractor to see, you know, how many stations, what type of stations, which ones are the right fit for you. You heard two great stories earlier, you know, of the mix between level two, level three, fleet, public, etcetera. So, you know, understanding your needs and working with your consultant will really help you determine the right setup for you. This can happen during the site visit. So but more importantly, it's usually better to have that idea prior to the site visit. So that way, you're really focused on how is it gonna get done. Where's the power gonna come from? Is it new service, existing infrastructure, etcetera? From there, you'll receive an estimate, execute your contract or purchase order. And if you hadn't done so prior, it's always important to contact your local utility, and I cannot emphasize that enough. Even if you are using your existing infrastructure, contact your local utility, make sure that the grid in your area has the capacity. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. And then from there, we'll order material, design engineer drawings, submit for permits, and install. All in all, from the moment you execute your contractor purchase order, it typically will be about two to four months for level two setups and about six months, for level three setups depending on, various material and utility coordinations. Now some very important considerations to talk about. The first one is ADA. Right? So a lot of times, there are certain state laws that now encourage ADA compliance, but as it is right now, there is no exact ED law when it comes to ADA. So I like to just point this out. A lot of people mean well when they're setting up ADA stalls, but they don't always execute it correctly. So I've got an example here. As you can see on the left, station is in the middle, walkway is easily accessible between two stalls versus the side on the right where, you know, the stall is away from the station, the station is over two feet away behind the curb, but there really shouldn't be any obstruction, you know, so that way a wheelchair can easily access it. And, also, there should always be a path so that way, you know, a wheelchair or anyone needing it, is not squishing between two vehicles that are parked there. Another very important consideration for those of you in flood areas is flood and DFE or design flood elevation. This is very important, especially in your Shoretown areas where the equipment itself for new services, they need to make sure they are elevated. Otherwise, they will not be compliant. And not knowing this and not considering it ahead of time can be very, very costly, as you get to the eleventh hour of design and engineering. So here's attached just a few pictures just so you kinda see the idea of different levels of design flood. Some other considerations. Again, I'm based here in New Jersey, so these happen to be New Jersey based, but you can apply them to your own state as well. FEMA flood mapping, again, very important for that DFE. Your utility territory map, EJ map. So a lot of state incentives will offer additional incentives if you are in an overburdened community as it was discussed. And then also the federal tax credit, which will be discussed a little bit more as well. This is specifically if you are in a rural or overburdened community, you're eligible for that federal tax credit. And even for you educational, there is something that's called the federal elective pay. So you can actually still take advantage of that even though you wouldn't be paying federal taxes, and so you wouldn't be getting a tax credit. Now, again, talking about the utility capacity, every utility again, these just happen to be the Jersey based ones, but every utility out there has a capacity map. I highly, highly, highly recommend when you're designing, especially for your fast chargers, you take a look at your existing utility capacity map. If you see that you're in one of those areas where it's red, where it's heavy and it's overburdened and capacity might not be there, talk to your utility and see what are your options. Because without that, you could be in a lot of trouble. And one other thing just before, Lisa jumps in to wrap us up, I also wanna make sure you point out, you know, think of safety, proper lighting, proper line of sight for security, cell boosting if you're in a garage, fire suppression, and future proofing. We can talk more during questions, but wanna pass it off to Lisa now to, take us away. Alright. Good afternoon. Thank you so much, George, and all of my fellow speakers. I work for EZ Ride. EZ Ride is a transportation management association, and we serve, a certain service area in New Jersey. We are the lead implementation partner for EVAL certification, But I wanted to let you know because I see people here from all over The US that you can reach out to your transportation management association. They're in every state, and they will provide technical assistance at no cost for you because we, have funding from the different state agencies. Agencies. So you've heard from, our EV experts, our educational institution champions today, and I hope that you are ready to commit your organization to install workplace EV charging for your staff, students, and local residents to make your community healthier. So, I wanna encourage you to start by making a pledge to charge at work. This is the QR code on the right hand side of your screen. You can, go to either, Calstart, their website, which is called Charge at Work, or you can, take a photo of this QR code, and you will, be put into our, pledging form, and we will pass that on to CalSTART for you. It's a nonbinding pledge. And I would also encourage you to check out the other two QR codes, which are resources from CalSTART, that can, you know, give you a better idea of how to get started with your project. So what is exactly EVAL? EVAL stands for the Electric Vehicle Adoption Leadership Certification Program. It's funded by the US Department of Energy. It's managed by Fourth Mobility, which is a nonprofit, based in Portland. And eval is a wonderful way to show your staff, students, and stakeholders that you value them by providing the service, that you care about the environment, and that you care about the health of your community. The easy ride is working to help Rutgers get their EVAL certification. And I've been so impressed as I've talked with their, sustainability director about the, portable Beam Global EVR charging stations that they are using. They can move them from campus to campus, from parking lot to parking lot, and they don't need to do any trenching or, construction. So that's a pretty amazing thing. They're pretty pricey, but, you know, Rutgers is a very large university, so I think they have a little bit more budget. One thing I learned about today when I was preparing for this webinar is that companies with EV charging stations and staff who drive, EVs can actually also get two lead certification points. So that's something to think about. So the EVAL website, which you can access using this QR code, also has a wonderful set of resources. There's educational materials. There's technical assistance, information there, to enable you to, develop your own workplace charging program. Alright. So who is eligible for EVAL? Pretty much any employer from any industry of all sizes, including states, counties, municipalities, educational institutions, community based organizations, nonprofits, and tribal government entities. The only groups that cannot apply for EVAL certification are, organizations that are only providing charging for their fleet vehicles. So EVAL certification, has four different levels. And as you can see, you don't need to get, out of the 100 points that they are, you can get by answering their questionnaire. You only need 15 to reach the bronze level. So, you know, even if you don't have chargers, even if you have a remote worksite where everybody works from home, you can get an EVAL certification, you know, to broadcast your commitment to sustainability. And, you know, then moving on, you've got silver, gold, and platinum, where you have to have at least 70 points to get to, a platinum award. Easyride is very proud to be a platinum certified EV adoption leader. So the certification process is actually quite useful. It helps you to figure out how to plan and look at your sustainability goals. And if you haven't started planning yet to put in EV chargers, going through this process will actually help you to plan very well. You know, it has surveys that you can use to survey, your employees, your stakeholders, whether they're students or families, who may visit campus, and to help you determine what is the best technology, what is the best way, where are the best places to put your chargers. It even has this great questionnaire questionnaire, that goes through all of the different evaluation or certification questions, but it also really helps you to think through, your priorities to make your plan. It also has wonderful ideas for your HR team to determine how they could incentivize sustainable commuting, whether that's using an EV, a hybrid, or even a bicycle or ebike, which I think is especially, important for educational organizations. You may have students who are getting to campus on bike, ebike, or e scooter. So it's really important to think about how, how you implement your program for the needs of your users. It also, helps you to figure out, how to expand access to charging. So, actually, I went forward a little bit, but, you know, Kate mentioned that she's going college hunting right now with her hers her child. And, when families of pro prospective students come to visit your campus, you know they're gonna bet they're gonna appreciate having a place to recharge their vehicle. So even if you can't install charges right away, you can also potentially look into an arrangement with a local business that has EV chargers. And if you make an arrangement where they let your, staff, or your stakeholders use the EV chargers, you can get bonus points for being innovative in how you develop your sustainability program. So I think that's something important for for, you know, small colleges, smaller campuses to to realize that you can figure out ways to provide that access to your constituents, that isn't gonna break the bank. So, students have a choice where they study. People can choose where they work, and most people like to select a place that has similar values to them. So getting EVAL certified is a way to broadcast your commitment to sustainability. And, Rosa from Plug In America, myself from EasyRide, we have partners all over the country that can help your organization get certified. So just reach out to us. We've got templates, questionnaires, surveys, and we're willing to help you at no cost, and give you that assistance you need. So what are some of the benefits? So number one, you can proclaim yourself as a sustainability and EV champion. You know, showcase by putting this, this seal on your website, maybe even on the front door of your campus. So they they give you, like, a nice certificate, a nice little decal that you can put, but, also, you can put this on your LinkedIn profile. And, you know, it really signifies a dedication to sustainability and EV infrastructure and health for your community, employees, and students. Right now, there are there is pricing for the certification, but there's also great discounts. Just by being here today, you are gonna get an extra 20% discount, which you can stack on top of, you know, whatever else you are. So if you're a municipality, you can get 25% off, plus the 20% equals 45. If you're a nonprofit, you also, get 25% off. If you are a minority or woman owned business, certification is free to you. If you belong to any of these other, categories, you can get certain discount off of the pricing. And there is never a need to recertify. This is a lifetime certification. The one thing that's crucial for those of you here today, register to start the certification process before June 30. You don't have to complete the certification by then, but register so that you will get that extra 20% on top of whatever discount you're qualified for. Alright. So, I'm going to open another poll or maybe Kate can help me open it. I'm interested to find out if you'd like to make a nonbinding, pledge to charge at work for your employees or if you'd like to get EVAL certified. And if we know that, we're gonna come and we're gonna help you. Okay. Let's keep going. Keep going. Keep going. I'm not sure how to how do we, alright. Well, look at that. We've got 25% or 20% already EVAL certified. And I love that 36% or actually, it keeps changing, but 42% are interested and 42% are, like, yes. So let's go. I'm gonna close that now so we can keep going. I don't know what happened to the slides. Okay. So talk with your oh, I wanna just go fast so we can get to at least five minutes of questions. Talk with your sustainability lead, Make your goals. Send us your pledge. Register to get EVAL certified before June 30, and, you know, we will walk and help you through the process. Keep going. These there are a lot of wonderful sustainability leaders. Many universities have already gotten certified. So I'm gonna ask, my fellow presenters to join me up here on stage, and we're gonna open it up. You can put your questions in the q and a if you look at the thing. I don't see any questions. Rosa, did we have some special questions that we prepared? Does anyone have a question? You can type it in. You'll see at the top, it says chat, docs, q and a. So if you click the q and a, you can type your question in. I don't see any questions, but I just wanna make it a 100% clear if I didn't already that for campuses and universities, they're such a pillar of our community. And offering EV charging often, people see what our schools and universities are doing as the first step. And if they do it, then it makes it more comfortable for the community to adopt that type of technology. What doctor McNally will often tell you is that there's so many students that are interested in green energy technology. They're adopting this technology themselves. They want to work in these types of careers. So having all of the pieces at your location just makes sense. And I know again for for my family, it definitely came down to some of those decisions as to what schools we were looking at. It's like my boys were very interested in technology, and it was very it was very, eye opening to see some tech colleges that didn't have EV charging. It it just doesn't mesh with what the conversation is they're telling their their students and their perspective students and their families that they're tech forward, but they didn't have EV technology in their parking lot. So just want them to know. Put that little spin. Yeah. Definitely, Gen z is very climate friendly. Gen z is climate friendly. On the chat from Dennis. He's saying, I'm in a small coastal municipality with very different populations throughout the year. What would we be doing with this charging station in the off season? That's an interesting question. Anyone in the panel want to share some thoughts? So I can Yeah. Oh, go ahead, Kate. It was me. I was gonna say, I think Dennis is from Deal, which is here in New Jersey. So it's a he's in the Jersey Shore town. And, honestly, Dennis, people who have EVs, you know, they have to charge all year round. While you may not have, you know, the 1,000,000, people population that we have in Monmouth County during the summer, we still have, you know, 650,000 people, in Monmouth County. And, you know, EV drivers, once we drive our EVs, we love them. We're not gonna, you know, not use them. And so, you know, I don't think you need to be worrying about what do you do with them in the off season because the reality is people drive all year round. Right? So, I think what you pointed out for EVAL certification too is to come up with those creative solutions. There may be an apartment building near to where you are that folks would be living there, but, you know, full time. There might be a business. There might be a a fleet that needs temporary. You know, there's there's definitely creative solutions as more and more people are adopting the technology. Exactly. So for your borough, you know, depending on what level of charger you get, you know, it could be something that not only do you open up for residents, but also it could be for, your own employees. But I I think also, you know, this is a revenue opportunity. I'm trying to think of which community in New Jersey I was speaking with. Actually, I think, Paul mentioned it. Right? So, he didn't have a lot of time, but, you know, some of the community start off offering these for free. And then once people get used to them and they know where they are, right, people love to drive down and walk on the beach and on the boardwalk in the winter time. They're gonna come to your community when they know you have chargers, and it's an opportunity for you to recap some of the investment. But better yet, if you can use some of the New Jersey rebates and incentives that we have, you can almost get, like, 90% of the construction cost at no cost. So you are just, you know, you're gonna reap some rewards because you can you can charge people to use the chargers. Yeah. I would I would echo to that point that our pricing varies, right, and can vary. In fact, a lot of I've observed myself as a EV driver, and many retailers use it as an attraction. So now, shore communities with boardwalks and things like may actually create a new customer for themselves in the off season. And, also, of course, when it's cold, we charge more often. So there is more time spent at these stations. And you'll wanna think about where you locate them. You know? So locating them at a place where maybe people go and spend a couple of hours, at the library, at recreation, near the parks, they go for a walk. They can plug in their car, charge, and go for a jog or take their dog for a walk. And they're, you know, multitasking. It's Kate Kruk and I know. And we're often doing, like, two or three things at the same time. So Alright. There's one more question. Is there experience from Daryl Warner? Is there experience with solar canopies over EV chargers? And I would love to hear from anyone in the panel about this. I'll take this one. So yeah. I mean, solar canopies over EVs are a beautiful, vision to see. There's a lot of municipalities that take advantage of it. A lot of educational entities have actually done exactly that. The biggest thing I will say is so outside of setups like Beam that was previously mentioned where it is a direct feed into the stations, most of the time, what makes the most sense is having those EV solar or those solar canopies over the EVs still connected to the grid to offset, the cost, but keeping the stations themselves not directly fed to those stations or to those solar canopies. So that way everything still got the reliability of working all the time when you want it, but having that solar offset the cost, that you would, incur from those. Yeah. I would take that just a step further too, George, is that I I absolutely agree that be beyond the beam setup, that's that kind of one, one stop is that you can even add that battery backup as a as an option as well where it's solar panel, battery, EV charger, and it might be on the same campus. But using that microgrid technology is gonna offset the way that the energy is being consumed and, brought in. So you could, you know, bring in your solar energy that can then feed the battery that could then essentially feed the grid and and so forth. So there's a lot to be done on them, but, like, to your point as well, those solar canopies can often, just be providing shade. And here in Upstate New York, maybe some protection from the constant rain. It it's definitely, you know, it's all about what your site is using it for. Mhmm. Especially days like today where it's, you know, record heat across the country. Keeping those EV batteries cool is is definitely, critical. Absolutely. Thank you. And I see that we are past the hour, but, I just wanted to share with, folks that there's a really cool feature here in Goldcast. So if you come back to the same link in the registration that you used to access this webinar, on the right, there's a docs Next to the chat, there's a docs tab where you can, get access to link post brochure, have some value community college brochure, information about email certification and questions and some speaker bios. And, again, by participating in today's webinar, you have us access to 20% discount for EVAL certification. And, it only lasts for a week. So really encourage you all to go on EVAL certification and go to the get certified part of the website and just register. And, you don't have to complete the process. But just by registering by thirtieth, you'll have access to that discount, which is stackable with other discounts as Visa shared. And there's, options for maybe one more question. I think that's all we have. Unless there are any final remarks. Oh, one more. Okay. That stands sharing a little bit more. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much for being here today and joining us, and, have a great rest of your day. Thanks for putting this together, and thanks for having us. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thank you. Bye. Bye, everyone. Reach out with questions.