Reports and Resources

EV Retail Rate Design 101, July 2022. This technical brief introduces and describes EV retail rate design, including motivations, metering configurations, cost recovery approaches, energy and demand charges (e.g., time-differentiated rate designs, locational-differentiated rate designs), charging controls, interactive grid services, and load flexibility. The brief synthesizes recent experience and identifies resources that provide more details and information.

Design Recommendations for Accessible Electric Vehicle Charging Stations, July 2022. The U.S. Access Board released the technical assistance document to aid in the development of a national network of EV charging stations that is accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. The document reviews existing requirements and new recommendations for making EV charging stations accessible. The document can assist individuals involved in the planning, designing, building, installing, and use of EV charging stations, including state and local governments, designers and developers, electrical and construction professionals, equipment manufacturers, automakers, utility providers, charge point operators and e-mobility service providers, EV owners, and people with disabilities.

Planning Considerations for Electric Vehicles – State Specific Reports. The Office of Electricity (OE) prepared these reports as part of the EVGrid Assist effort to assist decision makers as they construct plans, evaluate opportunities, and weigh alternatives. The reports introduce high-level concepts that are important for planning, emphasize grid considerations, and demonstrate two DOE-funded self-service analysis tools that can be accessed free of charge. The reports can be used to understand the value of the two tools in the planning process and can serve as a starting point for conversations. Results presented are only to demonstrate the tools and are not suggested solutions. Each decision maker or participant in the process will apply criteria that are important to them, their state, and their constituents.

Use the following map to download your state’s report:

A DOE webinar about the state specific reports is also available to view online.

An EV Future: Navigating the Transition, A Voices of Experience Initiative , October 2021. The report compiles ideas, advice, and approaches from various stakeholder perspectives about the transition to EVs. The topics include residential charging, long-haul transportation, public transit, infrastructure deployment, regulatory policy, and new market entrants.

The report also includes a broader, more informal collection of experiences and observations and explores successful approaches, as well as not-so-successful ones, to uncover unanticipated challenges or barriers.

Joint Office of Energy and Transportation Technical Assistance. The Technical Assistance webpage provides resources and tools to help decisionmakers plan and implement their state’s network of electric vehicle chargers and zero-emission fueling infrastructure, as well as zero-emission transit and school buses. Find resources, information about the National Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program process and more.

Electric Vehicle Charging Equity Considerations. The webpage from Argonne National Laboratory provides background information about the Justice40 Initiative, the process for identifying disadvantaged communities in census tracts, and the underlying indicators and sources for the Department of Energy and Department of Transportation working definitions of disadvantaged communities, in order to ensure investments in electric vehicle charging benefits disadvantaged communities.

Using Mapping Tools to Prioritize Electric Vehicle Charger Benefits to Underserved Communities, June 2022. The report describes the important role mapping tools play in incorporating equity goals in planning, implementation, and evaluation of investments in EV chargers. Building upon the Justice40 Initiative, the report provides examples of how to apply mapping tools to identify priority locations for installing EV chargers with the best potential to benefit energy and environmental justice (EEJ) underserved communities. Four approaches are described: corridor charging, community charging, fleet electrification, and diversity in STEM and workforce development. The report also explores various methodologies for calculating low public-EV charger density.

Tools

EZMT: Energy Zones Mapping Tool. This free online tool uses an extensive map library that can help identify potential locations for EV charging stations based on user-specified priorities. The tool can help identify gaps in corridors and where access to charging in underserved communities is limited. The library includes mapping layers such as Electrical Substations, HUD Opportunity Zones, EPA EJ Screen 2020, and Designated Alternative Fuels Corridor. It also includes equity data such as percent low-income, percent minority, household transportation energy burden, multi-family housing density, and manufactured housing density that can be included in the EV analysis or any of the other models in the system.

Visit the Clean Cities Coalition Network's webinar page to watch the series, Using the EZMT to Equitably Plan for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations. Additional videos on EZMT are available via YouTube.

REVISE: This nationwide modeling tool from Oak Ridge National Laboratory helps infrastructure planners decide where and when to locate EV charging stations along interstate highways to encourage the adoption of EVs for cross-country travel. The free open-source software, called REVISE-II, considers EV growth forecasts, charging technology capabilities, intercity travel trends, and driver demographics to help planners fill infrastructure gaps for charging facilities. By inputting various assumptions, planners can generate scenarios for future charging infrastructure requirements to encourage acceptance of EVs and accommodate growth as more EVs are adopted.

GridLAB-D: This tool enables modeling from the electrical grid substation all the way down to an individual device within a home. Researchers and utilities have used this detailed modeling capability to examine and evaluate distribution automation technologies, demand response markets, feeder reconfiguration strategies, and both the feeder-level and localized impacts of technologies like Distributed Energy Resources (rooftop solar and local energy storage), energy efficient appliance deployment, and EV adoption. These analyses have ranged from evaluating feeder electrical characteristics (feeder power or individual location voltages) to impacts to customer billing, across both short term (seconds) and long term (annual to multi-year) time horizons. GridLAB-D™ is considered an expert-level tool that requires national lab support.

Caldera: Caldera is an EV charging infrastructure simulation platform designed to inform the complex, future-looking decision making required today to enable the electrified transportation of tomorrow. By representing EV charging with individual vehicle and infrastructure agents and high-fidelity charging profiles, it is possible to forecast potential electrical loads with great precision based on transportation and proposed infrastructure inputs. The suite of tools includes Caldera Charge for EV charging load forecasting, Caldera Operate for mitigating EV charging load with battery storage, and Caldera Plan for resource constrained, incremental infrastructure deployment.

Caldera is currently a research tool that requires a license and some introduction from our researchers.

EVI-X Modeling Suite of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Analysis Tools: NREL has a suite of expert-assisted EV Grid Integration software: the EVI-X Modeling Suite of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Analysis Tools. NREL’s modeling suite informs the development of large-scale EV charging infrastructure deployments from the regional, state, and national levels to site and facility operations. In addition to identifying the number and type of chargers needed to meet a given demand, the tools enable researchers to pinpoint efficient charging station locations and find ways to mitigate the impact of charging loads on the electric grid by tapping into renewable energy and employing smart-charge technologies. Specialized modules that may be of interest include: EVI-Pro Lite for projecting consumer demand for EV charging infrastructure; EVI-EnSite to optimize site location; EVI-Fast (Financial Analysis Scenario), which estimates break-even prices to charge EVs based on input parameters such as installation costs, operation maintenance, usage, grid-infrastructure upgrades; EVI-RoadTrip, which analyzes charging infrastructure for long-distance travel; and EVI-Equity, which analyzes the accessibility of charging infrastructure from environmental-justice perspective.

Dsgrid: Demand-Side Grid Model: NREL's demand-side grid (dsgrid) model harnesses decades of sector-specific energy modeling expertise to understand current and future U.S. electricity load for power systems analyses. The primary purpose of dsgrid is to create comprehensive electricity load data sets at high temporal, geographic, sectoral, and end-use resolution. These data sets enable detailed analyses of current patterns and future projections of end-use loads.

JOBS (registration required): Argonne National Laboratory’s JOBS models evaluate how installing infrastructure for existing and emerging fuels (e.g. EV charging stations, natural gas, and hydrogen) affects jobs, earnings, ripple-effect spending, and gross economic output in an economy. Expenditures for fueling infrastructure are translated into dollar flows among industries, with impacts analyzed according to location and deployment level. JOBS tools enable scenarios at national, regional, and state scales. Within the spreadsheet tools, users define scenarios to estimate economic impacts for individual states, regions, or the United States as a whole. The tools contain default input values, but users can override default data with their own data for more project-specific results. Each tool contains user instructions.