EV Leaders: Avangrid

The Public Utilities Fortnightly team asked the same five broad questions of eighteen experts from twelve utilities. We found it so interesting to compare these dozen discussions, the commonalities, and the differences too. Read on to see what's up with EVs at Arizona Public Service, Avangrid, CMS Energy, Commonwealth Edison, Con Edison, Duquesne Light, Idaho Power, National Grid, NiSource, Portland General Electric, Puget Sound Energy, and Southern Company. 

And we wish to express PUF's gratitude to Bidgely, the energy intelligence and EV solutions company, that sponsored this special feature, and made it possible for us to bring it to you.

PUF's Steve Mitnick: What are the goals of Avangrid's electric vehicle programs, both residential and commercial fleet?

Scott Bochenek: We plan our EV activity in four different groupings with each having its own goal. The first helps to increase additional charging infrastructure with a goal to support fifteen thousand new chargers by 2030.

Scott Bochenek: We know that smart meter data is going to be an important resource to analyze EV charging load in the future. We have smart meters at Central Maine Power. Most of our customers at UI in Connecticut have smart meters, and we’re beginning the process of installing smart meters at NYSEG and RG&E in New York.

The second is related to electric vehicle managed charging programs, where our long-term goal is to efficiently integrate new EV load in a way that's going to increase the overall system efficiency. We know that EVs provide a unique opportunity as an electric load, unlike other electric loads being used around the clock, that there's an inherent flexibility for when they charge. Our goal is to optimize and take advantage of that flexibility.

The third is to have robust and granular forecasting to ensure we are proactively planning for new EV load. Finally, the fourth is to lead by example.

Avangrid is a clean energy leader across all ESG aspects and our CEO Pedro Azagra is extremely experienced in the clean energy space and committed to doing what it takes to reach our aggressive goals. This leadership support goes a long way toward enabling change.

For our fleet, Avangrid has a goal to transition sixty percent of our own fleet to clean alternatives by 2030. This includes one hundred percent of our light-duty fleet.

Charles Spence: In different contexts, smart meters could end up being all we need for managing the load, just sending out a generalized call to action, so to speak. Then seeing in hindsight, did people respond to that?

Charles Spence: A lot of the goals we have in terms of enrollments will depend on the number of people who could come onto our system with an electric vehicle. We have certain expectations we're planning for and have done forecasting to try to better understand what levels of EV adoption we might experience, but we have to be ready for as many as are going to come on. Our goal is not to be a bottleneck for EV adoption, but to be ready for any level of EVs on our system.

If we're talking about the specific goals I have for my programs, they tend to be the landing page for the people coming into the EV lifestyle. Generally, new EV owners look to their car dealership and their utility for more information.

So, our goal is to have programs that are beneficial to the customer and beneficial for our systems. Fundamentally, we need customers' buy-ins to be able to integrate their load.

We can't just say, plug in and figure it out. We must have a good back and forth with them. It's a little hard to quantify, but a goal on my end is making sure it's a little fun or at least engaging for the customer to charge the EV at the time we need them to and providing them with enough value that they don't mind delaying their charging, such that the electric demand hits our systems when it is optimal.

PUF: How are you educating consumers, including the commercial side? Any rebates or incentives, strengthening the infrastructure, or working with regulators?

Scott Bochenek: We have customer-facing programs approved at three of our utilities. We are implementing make-ready programs and a residential managed charging program at United Illuminating in Connecticut.

We just had the mass market EV managed charging program approved by the New York PSC earlier this year, and it recently launched for New York State Electric & Gas and Rochester Gas and Electric. We have also been implementing make-ready programs at those utilities for the past several years.

To provide a little more context for our utilities, RG&E is centered around the Rochester metro area but extends quite south. NYSEG is spread out across the state, and we cover almost forty percent of upstate New York.

We have United Illuminated in Connecticut, and it's about twenty percent of the state. In Maine, we have Central Maine Power, which covers southern Maine and about seventy-five percent of the load in Maine. We have done a few EV pilot programs in Maine.

The make-ready programs are incentivizing development of new charging stations and our managed charging programs are providing incentives for customers to charge off-peak via two tiers. The first tier is encouraging off-peak charging, and the more sophisticated tier is optimizing the portfolio of all the participants.

PUF: Dig a little deeper into the EV programs.

Charles Spence: In both Connecticut and New York, we have several programs. We have make-ready programs, which are infrastructure based.

Sometimes make-ready programs have a requirement to participate in a managed charging program for a set amount of time. For example, in exchange for receiving make-ready funds, a light-duty fleet owner or operator would be required to react to demand response signals for a minimum of twenty-four months.

This is not always the case, but in some of our programs, depending on the type of site, there are requirements. For residential, it's completely voluntary to join managed charging, but we do offer upfront incentives.

In Connecticut for United Illuminating, there are substantial upfront rebates for chargers and electrical work — we offer up to a thousand dollars to purchase and install a Level 2 smart charger. This is a healthy incentive that has received a lot of traction.

In New York at NYSEG and RG&E, we have enrollment incentives to entice EV owners to join.

Both states have requirements for participating in managed charging for a set amount of time to retain those incentives.

These programs give folks a reason to join, get a charger, get it installed, and on an ongoing basis, we have customers receiving monthly incentives for doing certain things related to charging at the right time.

As Scott mentioned, there are two tiers. One is an off-peak focused program where we ask customers to charge eighty percent during off-peak monthly. Then they get an incentive. That's called the baseline tier. It's the easiest for people to get involved in and do.

Then there's the advanced tier, which is when the customer sets a time they need their charge by and how much charge they'll need. For example, if I leave for work at seven a.m., I'll need a hundred percent charge. They set that, and then the algorithm works in the background to make sure they get their charge.

If they need to override it, they can, but it allows us to know what is going to be needed and coordinate with however many hundreds or thousands of EVs. We give monthly incentives for that, as well. Our program in New York is similar with minor differences.

PUF: There are external organizations, such as NGOs, community groups, national labs, consultants, and vendors. What types of groups are you engaging with?

Scott Bochenek: The desire from communities is higher than ever to engage with utilities around the topics of EVs and other beneficial electrification, including heating electrification.

We have municipalities in our service territories that we meet with on a regular basis to better understand and support their electrification targets. In our service territory in upstate New York, Ithaca has a goal to be a hundred percent electric in the next decade. Ithaca provides a great opportunity to assess and understand the challenges related to mass electrification.

We're engaging with municipalities closely to meet their targets, so much so, that we plan to add dedicated staff who will work on beneficial electrification, community engagement, and planning.

University partnerships also provide great research opportunities. We have both Cornell and Yale within our utility service territories and we're always doing some kind of project with those two. I'm talking to a professor at Yale now about a project to analyze heat pump related data.

Charles Spence: Generally, there're a good number of consultants who reach out. We tend to only directly interact with those who are part of our stakeholder process that we have through various working groups or regulatory proceedings.

In terms of how we've interacted with regulators, a lot of it is part of a generalized process that takes place as these cases and dockets go through. There have been a number of open cases where there are open comment periods where we get information from the industry.

It's helpful for us to learn directly from the industry as we develop the programs, in that formalized process where we heard from them, as regulators would ask for comments and how should we plan this program.

We also had to go through procurement for our managed charging vendor. We do not have internally the capabilities to manage the load. Utilities go to software companies generally. We partner with a company called EV Energy, quickly becoming the go-to.

We did a procurement that had several companies sharing their capabilities, and we had a number of interviews. That was most beneficial for us in terms of understanding what's available on the market and selecting that final provider.

PUF: How are you dealing with data analytics and understanding adoption rates?

Scott Bochenek: We are looking at a lot of new transportation-related data sources that we never had to pay attention to in the past, such as vehicle registrations, sales trends, and all kinds of industry forecasts. We are even looking at highway traffic data to help assess where chargers might be needed.

We also know that smart meter data is going to be an important resource to analyze EV charging load in the future. We have smart meters at Central Maine Power. Most of our customers at UI in Connecticut have smart meters, and we're beginning the process of installing smart meters at NYSEG and RG&E in New York.

There's the use case of using smart meter data to proactively identify which customers have EVs in the first place, and then using the data to analyze the impact of our various incentive programs with moving their load around. In the future, we will be leveraging that capability from the smart meter investments to do that sort of analysis.

PUF: Personal cars are one issue, but the heavy-duty trucks, that's going to be something.

Charles Spence: In different contexts, smart meters could end up being all we need for managing the load, just sending out a generalized call to action, so to speak. Then seeing in hindsight, did people respond to that?

That's the capability of smart meters. It offers a lot of different things. It offers the ability to see if charging behaviors are impacted by certain cues that we send to the customer. It also can help identify people or entities who have EVs based on usage patterns.

Scott Bochenek: Across the industry when it comes to EVs, utilities are building much more sophistication in how we forecast. Historical load growth happened somewhat organically, and we could base a lot of the future on what's happened in the recent past. We can't do that with EVs because there're so many factors that determine where the load is going to show up.

It's a bit easier when we think about charging at people's homes because you can look at where there are pockets of adoption. We tend to see certain geographic areas. There're zip codes or census tracts where there's clustered adoption of EVs, and we can use that data to help identify where the clusters are, but it's not so easy for highway corridor charging.

In some cases, you could have one highway exit that is going to have multiple circuits that are feeding that area. Our ability to serve that load is going to depend on exactly where that charging is located. For medium- and heavy-duty electrification, we are now building and understanding the data around where fleets sit and how fleets operate.

For the utility industry, it's something that we haven't paid attention to historically, but that's the sort of thing that we need to get good at in the next few years.

PUF: Where is your program going to be three to five years from now?

Scott Bochenek: Our light-duty EV make-ready programs will continue for the next three to five years. I think we are going to see the need for more and larger highway fast-charging stations. We are trying to proactively identify where we might need these.

For managed charging, I look at this current iteration of program implementation as the learning phase. We're learning how customers are going to respond, and what level of incentive is going to be required to get customers to charge in a certain way that's going to lead to beneficial outcomes.

I think the biggest change we are going to face in the next three to five years is supporting the adoption of medium- and heavy-duty EVs. These fleets are going to have high charging loads and we will need to work proactively with customers and stakeholders as we plan and build out grid capacity.

Charles Spence: We have the capability, but we don't quite have all the dots connected to be able to control vehicle charging. We are not at the point yet where we're making real-time cost-benefit analysis for each EV to inform when they charge and when they don't.

It depends not only on the rate of charge, but also what is happening at that specific location on the system and what the portfolio aggregation of EVs is doing at any given time. We don't have that yet, but in the three-to-five-year timeframe, we'll have a lot of baseline data from our programs. Then with better capabilities and integrations, we'll be able to say on Tuesday at five p.m., all these vehicles turning off will be worth this much.

Then we may be able to incentivize more appropriately the program levels to incentivize people to join. It'll be more optimized from a cost perspective and making sure constraints on the grid are addressed using the flexibility that these EVs provide. That's the coolest stuff.

EV Leaders conversations at fortnightly.com:

• Arizona Public Service's Kerri Carnes and Tony Perez
• Avangrid's Scott Bochenek and Charles Spence
• CMS Energy's Lauren Snyder and Jeff Myrom
• Commonwealth Edison's Diana Sharpe
• Con Edison's Britt Reichborn-Kjennerud
• Duquesne Light's Brian Guzek 
• Idaho Power's Billie McWinn and Patti Best
• National Grid's Melissa Lavinson
• NiSource's Fred Gomos
• Portland General Electric's Larry Bekkedahl
• Puget Sound Energy's Josh Jacobs and Malcolm McCulloch 
• Southern Company's Lincoln Wood and Stephanie Gossman