Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Yes. You're live.

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: Are you live?

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: You're live. We're live.

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: We are Friday, May 1, and we are going back online. Bronwyn, are you there?

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: I am. Good morning.

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: Thank you. Name and a little background, then we're yours for the next half hour.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Right. For the record, my name is Bronwyn Cook. I am a Community Planning and Policy Manager for the Department of Housing and Community Development in the Community Planning and Revitalization Division. My apologies, I've been getting over a cold, so my voice is a little hoarse. At You some

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: would have the legislature, I wouldn't apologize.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: My apologies if I go on mute for a second just to clear my throat. I'm also talking with a cough drop in my mouth, but-

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Don't We'll

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: see how this goes. I'm going to share some slides. All right, can you all see my screen?

[Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: Yes, yes.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Great. It's not in the presentation mode. There we go. Now it's lovely.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Okay. All right, how does that look to you all? Good. Great. I sent these slides last night. I'm sure you haven't had a chance to look them through. Because we have a half hour, I have a lot of slides, I'm gonna breeze through very quickly some of the table setting slides. I know you all have taken testimony on some of the state's electric vehicle charging infrastructure work from VTrans earlier in the year. And I know you guys aren't new to this. We'll breeze through some of the table setting so that we can really save time for our current program that we're operating in Charge Vermont and leave plenty of room for conversation. So with no further ado, just a quick reminder of where I sit. As I'm in I the Community Planning and Revitalization team in DHCD. We're sort of a mishmash of folks with a lot of different backgrounds, landscape architecture, planning, land use, zoning policy. My personal background is mostly in the climate and energy space. I've got about ten years working in the electric vehicle charging infrastructure space before I joined the state. Again, just an overview of the slides that you'll be looking at, and I'll again be focusing mostly on the second half of the presentation. Again, don't need to go over this with you all so much, but the electric vehicle charging infrastructure is a whole mix of chargers of different speeds in different places. Most of what ACCD has focused on is from this yellow level and below that. So, public charging in some of our downtown centers. More recently, we've been working on infrastructure that is meant for employees at workplaces and residents of multiunit properties. One of the tools that we use to kind of gauge not only the different levels of charging that we need and the different places that we need it is, you know, how much are we going for? How much charging infrastructure is quote unquote enough? That's a very difficult question to answer, but one of the things that we rely on is well, two of the things we rely on, the Global Warming Solutions Act includes some modeling that helps us understand how many electric vehicles we would need on the road in Vermont to help achieve our emissions goals. But we also have this tool through the DOE, the Department of Energy, that helps us determine if we have a certain number of vehicles that we're aiming for, what does the infrastructure need to look like to support that number of vehicles? This just gives us a sense of, based on that 2030 goal of having 126,000 EVs on the road in Vermont, what does our electric vehicle charging infrastructure need to look like? Again, we've done a little bit of work in this public DC fast charging space, but a lot of that now is being covered with the NEVI program. More and more, what we're focusing on is this other shared private charging ports in multiunit dwellings and private workplaces. Just a quick background on how ACCD even got involved in electric vehicle charging infrastructure. We started working in this space before I even arrived back in 2014. The state received settlement funds from the VW emissions debacle, and we started administering some grants then, really focused again on the connection between EVSE infrastructure and local economic development in our downtowns. There seemed to be a really strong connection there. Given our involvement in the downtown program, we administered these early funds. Again, mostly focused on DC fast charge and public level too in our downtown and village centers. Also in that 4,000,000, there was some additional money just from VTrans to continue doing those kinds of grants. More recently, with Act 185, we received a direct appropriation of $10,000,000 And with those funds, that's when we really shifted towards doing more in the multiunit space and workplaces. There was also a small part of that appropriation that went to public charging at state workplaces. So I have one quick slide on that, but if you're interested in more information on that program, I would certainly recommend bringing in Brian Sewell from BGS as he manages that program. Brian? Yep.

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: Sewell, it's the BGS Energy. Act 185, do you know if that was the T bill or if that was the budget? Do you know?

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: I believe that was the I believe that was the T T bill.

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: I think so. I just wondered if you remember. I can look it up.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was the T bill. It switched at one point. There was one year where it was the T bill, and then later on it switched to being in the budget bill. So it's kind of gone back and forth where the funding has come through in the different acts.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Has it been in the capital bill?

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Not our funding, I don't

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: think.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Okay. Thank you.

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: The

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: bulk of what we have been working on for the past three, almost four years, is the rest of that $10,000,000 appropriation, plus some additional appropriations that have come through since then, which have all been supporting the Charge Vermont program. That's what I'll spend most of the rest of this time talking about. But if you have any questions or need me to stop, please feel free to do so. Before I jump into that, I will just One very quick note. There's a lot of slides on this, and I'm going to mostly skip it, but I did just want to point out that of that earlier $4,000,000 that ACCD has invested, All those stations are in the ground and they're operating. Through our grant contracts, we are doing some monitoring and evaluation of those investments. We've done a couple of case studies, which are on our website, and I think you all have seen those last year. The other thing we started doing was most of those grant contracts required that the grantees report the station use data to us. Compliance with that was really tricky. In some cases, it's because the equipment that went into the ground did not have the software attached to it. That makes it very easy to report the data. In some cases, the equipment was just hooked up to an electric meter that was servicing other parts of the building, so it's really challenging to know what electricity use was coming from the station in particular. But there were a lot of pieces of our equipment that did have separate meters that are networked, and they typically have really sort of snazzy data reporting platforms with them. In the past year or two, we've worked really hard to help our grantees to figure out how to use those systems and make sure that they're getting their usage reporting to us so that we can start to analyze it. Through some of those efforts, we went from a very low compliance rate to almost percent compliance on that reporting, which is, I think, pretty fantastic. Then we've been able to take that use data, work with Drive Electric Vermont to analyze that data, and get a sense of mostly, we just wanted to know, are these stations being used? If we're investing in them, are they being used? Like I said, I'm gonna skip through these slides. If you wanna stop on anything, let me know. The long story short is, yes, they're being used. They tend to get used, maybe not very much in the first couple of months, but we see that their use sort of steadily over time as more EV drivers are on the road and as more people become aware that those stations are there and available to them. So that's all great news. We

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: have a question.

[Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: Thank you, Prakrit. So we included in the most recent T Bill some language around requiring EBSC. What was the exact word we used? But the providers to give information, greater detailed information. But this seems like you actually have been able to get a significant amount of data that I didn't actually know that you were getting. So I'm wondering if you've seen that bill or perhaps have any comments on like access to data from the charge points or the EVgoes of the world that you collect?

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Yes. I did see the bill. There's a lot in there. The data that we have is essentially session by session information. The data that a provider would need to make available to a third party software developer is not that detailed. That information is more just, is the station available? Where is it located? What's the fee structure? We get that information, but we also get down to the minute, when was a session started, when did it end, how many kilowatt hours was used in that session. And it's all anonymized. The data that we get is anonymized. Part of what allows both that legislation and the data that we get in is the requirement that if a station And this is our requirement for our grants. If a station is made available to the general public, it has to be networked, and that's what allows that data sharing. That network has to be meeting the OCPP, the Open Charge Point Protocol standards, which essentially just allows different software and different equipment to communicate outside of their own network or their own manufacturing.

[Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: Well, thank you. I feel like we should have had you come in during that testimony because I think you get a lot of the data that we were kind of hoping to see, but maybe I misunderstood. No, I Go ahead.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Thank you. Well, there's all kinds of data, so I think it's good for having multiple ways to get it. So I'm interested in how the the usage of the DC chargers, especially the the really fast ones on the highway, would if it I I would expect that out of state you that there'll be a higher number of out of state versus in state users because Vermonters many of them have chargers at home. Oh, good. Look at this. That's what I wanted to see.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Just keep in mind that for this set of data that we have, we only have two DC fast charge locations in our data set right now. We have a lot more that we'll be reporting starting as of a couple quarters ago, and we just haven't analyzed those new stations. This is a very small subset for the DC Fast Charge. So this slide, And just so you're aware, this slide includes all of our equipment, the DC Fast Charge and level two. It is mostly public stations in this dataset, so not as many of the multiunit have also been reporting yet. It just gives you a sense of, yes, there is a lot of out of state, but there's a lot of in state as well that tend to be using the stations.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Okay. All right. So just going forward, I think it's very helpful to have that information and I think it would not be a privacy issue, hopefully, if we just had the state of the person's residence because what if even actually honestly with any payment mechanism somebody's going to know the state because it's not going to be cash.

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: So that

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: would be helpful to know.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Yeah, and again, we are continuing to require use data reporting from all of our DC Fast Charge investments. We are not requiring use data reporting from our level two investments now simply because this was a lot of work. This was maybe two years worth of work to do this. With Charge Vermont, we've scaled up our investment in Level two so much that we wouldn't be able to do this kind of data reporting with our Level two. And general sense is that DC fast charge is really where we do want to do some more sort of analytical work around how the stations are being used, to inform policy but also to inform future investments, etcetera. We will continue to have this kind of use data, but only for our DC Fast Charge investments. The other thing that's worth noting is we've made an effort to amend all of our contracts with our DC Fast Charge grantees so that their reporting is the same as NEVI, so that we'll have a consistent comparable dataset across those two programs.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Okay. Did NEVI include the state that they live in? I don't know if it did.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: No. I'm glad you asked. I was just reviewing the EV chart the other day. I don't believe that that is reported through EV charts. So we will lose some of that by staying consistent with the NEVI data.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Okay. So then you're saying we would not know what state they're from? I'm just interested in Vermont and not Vermont.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Yeah, I'd have to double check and it would be worth checking it with VTrans as well. NEVI has not been my area of expertise, but we did. Part of this was to make it easier for the vendors as well to not have two different reporting standards between state funds and federal funds. Also, other standards around how uptime and outage is reported, etcetera. We just wanted to be as consistent as possible. I will have to check to make sure to see if the zip code information that we have been getting from our state funded equipment is included in that NEVI reporting.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Okay. Thank you for checking.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: You got it. Okay. So, a quick slide just on the MOU with BGS. We do have an MOU with them to install chargers in up to eight locations. We've had that MOU for about two years. There's been some delays on their end that I'm aware of. Again, for more details on this, you'll want to talk to Brian Sewell. Just in terms of our contract management, grant management, the initial delay was mostly around procurement, and I think BGS was looking to try and find someone who would own and operate these stations. There was a lot going on with contracting. Once they had sorted that, the return to office policy kicked in, and so BGS wanted to sort of go back to the drawing board a bit and sort of reassess where charging stations could go based on where employees were going to be, in theory, driving back into their work sites more often. I believe that survey has just closed, and so I think they're trying to get some of those investments in the ground now. Okay, so the bulk of what I focus on and what we've been working on is this Charge Vermont program. This is just a big picture snapshot of what we've done since the program launched back in July 2023. So, it's been in operation for, in total Well, this was a year end snapshot. So, as of the 2025, the program had been in operation for thirty months. I will say that the first maybe four or five months of that was kind of like a soft launch. We were working out some kinks in the website, just kind of getting marketing out there and working with RPCs and other partners to get the word out about the funding. But, in all, for practical purposes, it's been operating for about thirty months. I've got some averages here in terms of how much has been invested, projects that are both contracted and in the pipeline. What we mean by that is we have sort of Well, I'm just gonna hop to the next slide. Actually, no, I'm not gonna hop to the next slide. I'll just explain it very quickly. Projects that are contracted just mean that the project has submitted a pre application, it's been approved by the program administrators, and it is either in construction In construction, it's maybe complete by now, or they're in a design estimate phase. And that's usually the phase that kind of takes the longest. It's when a property owner is having an electrician come out to the site, see what sort of electrical upgrades they might need, where the station should be located, etcetera. But those are projects that we are still sort of holding money for because they have a pre approved application and they're just working through some of the technical details and getting site approvals before they actually do the construction. Once a project is in that design estimate phase, it usually completes. We're holding the money for those projects that are in the pipeline. Just a quick Yep,

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: go ahead. So what kind of chargers are these? Are these homes or what are these? I'm sorry.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: This summary includes everything that's in the Charge Vermont program, which is multiunit, so charging for residents of multiunit properties, workplace charging, so charging that's intended for employees of workplaces. This summary does also include some competitive grants that we did give for DC fast charging. I'll go into that in a little bit more detail, but essentially it was This includes nine grants for DC fast charging in locations that were further than 10 miles from existing DC fast charging. So, our grants for this were really trying to get out into the pockets of Vermont that didn't have good access to DC fast charging yet.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Great. Thank you.

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: So it's

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: not single family homes? It's

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: not single

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: family Got it.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: No single family. And for us multi unit is three or more units.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Okay, so

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: this is not single family homes, but it's not like the charger at, like here, at a store.

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: It's mostly multifamily homes, three or more units, but there are, like you said, a few of the high charge, you know, level three chargers where you might have several, you know, just for just a charging station. So a lot of them also in the workplaces where the public could go So in the evening. Okay. Well,

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: so this is workplace charging. This is multiunit housing. This this wouldn't be a charger, like, on the interstate. So she said this

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: is three. It could be, but there are only a few of those. It's been focused on the level two's. My

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: apologies. This might be because my head's a little fuzzy with the colds. There were technically four categories in the legislation that we needed to invest in. The state owned workplaces, multiunit workplace, and the last one is public attraction. Most of what we did with public attraction was with DC fast charging, just kind of recognizing that when people are out and about at a public place, they typically are not parked there very long. They do want a faster charge. We did, however, have a very small amount of funding that we did invest in level two public attractions. I have some slides that kind of break that out, but since this program launched, additional appropriations that have come into the program have specifically excluded public attractions. I'll go into some of that a little bit more because it has to do with where we see the program going and where we saw a lot of demand for the chargers. It differs across the state in different counties. Just a quick review of where the program started. We selected Green Mountain Power through a competitive process to be an administrator of the program to partner with DHCD in administering this. It started with an initial grant award of 7,000,000. Of that 7,000,000, just under 5,000,000 went for rolling level one and level two incentives, and those are at the multi unit, the workplaces, and a very little bit of the money was for public attractions, level two at public attractions. 1,400,000 of that was for that competitive DC Fast Charge incentive program for areas that are more than 10 miles from existing DC Fast Charge. And then there's an admin percentage of that. That was in March 2023, and so it took us a couple of months to really design the program, design the website, figure out the incentive structure, etcetera. We launched the program in July 2023. There were a lot of parameters put in place to try and make sure the funding was distributed across the state as best as possible. One of the key things that we put in place was that no one county could receive more than 10% of the total funds. We also have utility territory caps to reflect customer base. So, I think in part because GMP was our administrator on this, but the program is open to any property owner and any utility, we wanted to make sure that the amount of funds going to any one utility was sort of reflective of that customer base. By July '23, so within that first starting month, Chittenden County was fully subscribed. We had enough pre applications from Chittenden County that they well exceeded that 10% cap. We announced that we weren't really gonna be able to take more applications from Chittenden County. By August 2023, the 360,000 that we had sort of slaughtered aside for level two at public attractions, that was fully subscribed. By June '24, so a little less than a year later, the 1,800,000 for workplaces was fully subscribed. Around between February and May, some of our counties started to hit that 10% cap. So Washington, Windham, and Windsor then also became fully subscribed. In July '24, that's when we launched the competitive DC Fast Charge Awards. Again, looking for locations that were more than 10 miles from existing DC Fast Charge. We had probably 20 or 30 pre applications, and we invited folks who met the eligibility criteria to submit full applications. We ended up awarding nine. At least two of those have been installed, one at the Vermont Country Store and one down at the Woolen Mills between Woodstock and Killington. Those projects are getting completed. They're obviously a little bit more complicated, and so they do take a little bit longer to get done. In August '25, we started receiving additional funds from another appropriation. The appropriation was for 1,700,000. With that additional funding, what we decided to do was to, instead of working with a 10% county cap, we wanted to create a funding floor. By this time, we were seeing that some of the counties were probably gonna take a little bit longer to find property owners who are interested, and we wanted to make sure that there would be funding available to them. So we created a funding floor with these additional funds. Sorry, was that a question?

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: No, just loud. Noise in the hallway.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Oh, okay, sorry. With that funding floor, we were anticipating preserving these funds to ensure that each county would get up to 486,000 to do multiunit workplace investments in their communities. Since then, that funding floor has been in place for a little under a year. The uptake in those counties has still been a little bit slower than we expected. This just gives you a snapshot at the 2025. This is where we're at in terms of the number of projects that were both contracted. They've signed an agreement to do the project or projects that were in the pipeline. They have an approved application and they are in the process of getting their design and estimate from a contractor. I think I'll move on from here, just keeping an eye on time.

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: Yeah, we're a couple

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: of minutes of having to.

[Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: It is 11:30.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: So how about, I'm just gonna skip ahead really quick to talk. So long story short, the program is going well. We're back to that average. We're putting about 1,600,000 out the door in incentives to projects on average every year of the program. Right now, we've got roughly almost 3,000,000 in projects, and we are continuing to have applications roll in. One of the things that I think has maybe slowed the program a bit is we capped the counties. Early on in this program, Chittenden County, Washington, Windham, Windsor, they were all getting the message that we don't have any more funds for you, even though we still had lots of demand and interest. We did that to kind of give those other counties a chance to catch up and still know that there was money available to them. I think now that we've had that funding floor in place and we've seen sort of the cadence of projects come in, I think one of the adjustments we are likely to make in our We're getting ready to make some amendments to the program. One of the things I think we will do is reduce that funding floor to open up additional funding for the counties who have higher demand and are ready to go with projects. We'll be able to infuse some additional funds into those rolling level one and level two for counties that have reached that 486,000, but still have more demand. The public attraction pieces is gonna be interesting. So one of the things that we noticed is in those counties that haven't seen as much investment, we haven't seen as many applications, there has been a higher demand in those counties for public attractions and less so for multiunit and workplace. I think one of the things we are considering doing is opening up more funding for public attraction. One of the challenges that we're facing is that in a lot of those counties, small utilities tend to have demand charges, and that becomes really challenging for DC Fast Charge. It makes it very difficult for the projects to pencil out. And so we've had a couple of projects that have taken many years to get through to work through those demand charges. I think for this program, what we would end up doing is focusing on level two for those public attractions in some of those counties that haven't seen quite as much investment yet.

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: We do need to, y'all this has been great. Yeah. This is very informative and it's just the kind of information we need.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Great. Well, hopefully

[Andrew Perchlik (Member)]: we can have you back.

[Richard Westman (Chair)]: We will.

[Bronwyn Cook, Community Planning and Policy Manager, DHCD]: Wonderful. Well, great. Thank you so much for letting me share some of this program. I'm happy to answer any questions offline at any point in the future if you all need anything.

[Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Thank you. Thanks