Driving EV Adoption Forward: Celebrating National Drive Electric Week

Electric vehicles (EVs) continue to soar in popularity and, as they become more commonplace, it’s increasingly important for businesses and decisionmakers to not only understand the benefits, complexities, and future use cases for EVs, but also implement policy solutions to better prepare for the widespread transition to electrified transportation.  

Kicking off today and running through October 6 is National Drive Electric Week (NDEW), which aims to heighten awareness and highlight the benefits of today's widespread availability of all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. NDEW is a celebration of the transformative power of EVs to lower transportation costs for drivers, improve public health, and even improve electricity resilience for households and communities. During NDEW, there are several events hosted in various cities throughout the country, including EV showcases, test drives, presentations, and community engagement activities to educate the public about the advantages and positive economic and environmental impacts of EVs. 

United's EV Ready Grid Guidebook

In celebration of NDEW, we’ve introduced a new resource, “EV Ready Grid Guidebook: A Practical Guide to Preparing the Grid for Electric Vehicle Adoption at Scale,” which presents a comprehensive set of policies and principles designed to help government agency staff, policymakers, regulators, and utilities prepare the grid for large-scale EV adoption. The guidebook presents a blueprint for decisionmakers and regulators to proactively pursue policy solutions that will ensure a smooth transition to EVs while protecting consumers, including deploying the EV charging infrastructure needed, preparing the grid for sector wide electrification, and harnessing the positive impacts on the energy system. 

Developed alongside EV industry stakeholders and infrastructure experts, the guide outlines model policies across four key focus areas: 

1. Fully Planning for Transportation Electrification: Utilities should adopt more advanced planning techniques using forecast modeling and align the deployment to state and federal vehicle electrification targets, along with other sources of new load like data centers and building electrification. State regulators and energy and transportation departments should work together in new ways to tackle the issue most effectively.
    
   
2. Updating the Utility Regulatory Model for the 21st Century: The prevailing utility regulatory and business model is ill-equipped to handle the expected shift in energy consumption over such a short time. Utility spending and compensation should be deployed to better align with the pace of change, e.g., by allowing proactive capital investment to reduce duplicative construction projects, performance-based incentives to drive towards desired outcomes, and creating more opportunities for utility customers to invest in their own infrastructure.
   
   
3. Removing Barriers to Building EV Charging Quickly: In addition to utility fees, procedural delays, such as utility site energization and local government permitting and zoning challenges, cut into the viability of EV charging as a business model. These issues prevent the private market from deploying plugs quickly and achieving the scale needed for mass EV adoption.
    
4. Maximizing Existing Built Infrastructure: Technologies and policies to reduce system peaks through time-varying rates, load management software, and the incorporation of distributed energy resources (DERs, which include EVs) can defer or even avoid the need for additional physical grid infrastructure. Transparency into local available grid capacity helps charging installers site projects in areas that can handle the additional load with little or no upgrade costs. 

While states have taken some of the steps outlined in the guidebook, no state has completely addressed all of the policies therein. We encourage policymakers, state energy officials, and utility regulators to work together and across state lines to share solutions that address the important work of preparing the grid for EVs. Together, these model policies offer a flexible yet comprehensive framework that can be tailored to local conditions and needs, empowering stakeholders to develop strategies that promote sustainable and efficient electrification of transportation.