The GridWise Alliance is convening two working groups, one on electric vehicles and another on resilience. These working groups support GridWise material related to these topics and focus on convenings and products that relate to funding in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
The EV working group has been meeting for nearly a month now. At the end of January, we developed and submitted a response to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) request for information (RFI) on EV charging infrastructure deployment, which you can access here. Then, just last week, FHWA provided guidance on the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program. In addition to providing information on this $5 billion dollar program, we are pleased to see aspects of our RFI response reflected in the formal guidance considerations. You can see a comparison of our RFI response to the final NEVI Formula Program guidance considerations here. Since the RFI response, the EV working group has been focused on developing a short issue paper on near-term grid investments for integrating electric vehicle charging infrastructure, which will be finalized over the next week and shared with the broader membership and key contacts at DOE, DOT, and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Other ongoing work includes planning for a joint GWA-NASEO-AASHTO workshop to be held on March 7th on state EV infrastructure planning efforts and reviewing a capstone project on fleet electrification run by a group of George Washington University graduate students.
The Resilience working group is just kicking off. Following a call for volunteers last week, we received interest from 20 member organizations and will be scheduling bi-weekly meetings in the coming weeks. This group is intended to support GridWise material on the issue of grid resiliency, particularly related to the $11 billion in the IIJA, and will be ready to respond to any forthcoming grid resilience related requests for information or other opportunities. Please reach out to Malaika Walton at mwalton@gridwise.org if you’d like to be added to either working group.