Este funcionario de Biden transformará la red de carga de vehículos eléctricos de Estados Unidos

La financiación federal para la red pública de carga de vehículos eléctricos de Estados Unidos fluye a través de Gabe Klein.

El año pasado, Klein era un conocido líder de pensamiento en el conjunto de la movilidad del transporte. Anteriormente dirigió los departamentos de transporte en Chicago y Washington, DC, creó su propia consultoría de movilidad y ha invertido y asesorado a nuevas empresas de transporte. Si tenía preguntas sobre los scooters eléctricos y la política de la ciudad, él estaba entre las primeras personas a las que llamaría.

Hoy, Klein está a la vanguardia de los intentos de Estados Unidos de construir muchos más cargadores de vehículos eléctricos públicos a medida que aumenta el mercado nacional de vehículos eléctricos. Se le asignó la tarea de encabezar una Oficina Conjunta de Energía y Transporte, la primera de su tipo, establecida entre los Departamentos de Energía y Transporte, y tiene $ 7.5 mil millones en fondos de infraestructura EV para entregar. 

GreenBiz se reunió con Klein siete meses después de haber iniciado el trabajo para discutir qué hará la oficina conjunta para la confiabilidad del cargador, la asequibilidad de los vehículos eléctricos y los arrendatarios urbanos que quieren vehículos eléctricos. Esta conversación fue editada y condensada. 

Katie Fehrenbacher: ¿Por qué EE. UU. necesita una oficina conjunta entre transporte y energía específicamente ahora en este momento?

gabe klein: Hay muchas razones. Por un lado, cuando [el presidente Joe Biden] encabezó esto, trabajando con el Congreso, rápidamente se dieron cuenta de que tenían que romper los silos entre la energía y el transporte. 

Transportation is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions since 2016. And you can't really separate one from the other if you're going to address these issues. The president also talks about the fact that this is a huge opportunity to create jobs.

Algunas cosas me quedaron claras desde los primeros días. Una es que querían romper los silos y centrarse realmente en los resultados para la ciudadanía. Dos, se tomaron muy en serio la equidad y Justicia40 [the program focused on ensuring federal investments reach underserved communities]. And three, they weren't giving lip service to climate issues. But this was a very serious issue for the administration and a pillar from a policy standpoint. 

Fehrenbacher: You've been on the job a little over seven months. What are some of the biggest lessons you've learned so far?

Klein: I came from the transportation sector, and I've always had a deep interest in energy and climate. Having said that, the energy industry is going through a complete shift as the transportation space has gone through over the last decade as well. So I would say that, for me, there's definitely been a learning curve getting up to speed. There’s just amazing expertise at DOE that I've been able to tap into to learn from. And there's an opportunity for me to teach in terms of my background and what I bring to the table.

This is all new for a lot of people. We've only been building EVs seriously for 20 years, and what's behind that with renewable and distributed energy. We’re talking about a paradigm shift with how the economy works and not powering it with fossil fuel anymore. When you put it all together, you realize everybody's learning; even the experts are learning. 

But we don't just want to have a hammer, we want to have a carrot as well, right? And so we want to also work closely with industry to make sure that they can meet those standards.

A study came out [recently] saying 47 percent of people said that they wouldn't buy an EV as their next car. I thought 53 percent was pretty awesome, considering we’re in 2023. I think by 2024, ‘25, ‘26, that number is going to be upwards of two-thirds of the country. And then upwards of 80 or 90 percent. 

And then the other side of that coin, of course, is that a lot of people live in urbanized areas, and people may not be buying as many vehicles, they may be accessing vehicles [via other models] whether it's Hertz, who has 360,000 EVs on order, or car share or ride hail or electric bikes and scooters. We're going to continue to see a shift in the way people move on top of the way that people use energy.

Fehrenbacher: Speaking of urban living, I live in San Francisco in a rental apartment, and so far I've been frustrated that I can't participate in owning an EV. How is the joint office helping that issue of charging and multi-tenant dwellings?

Klein: If you look at our mission, it's for everybody to be able to ride or drive electric. We don't necessarily want to force an urban dweller like yourself to go out and buy a vehicle if your life is perfectly fine using transit, using bikes and having the occasional access to a rental or a ride hail vehicle. But if you decide that, hey, you need to buy a vehicle, we want you to have access to that charging at your apartment complex. And so there's a couple ways that can happen. 

There's the [Fórmula de Infraestructura Nacional de Vehículos Eléctricos, o NEVI], donde una vez que cada estado esté completamente construido, lo que significa que tienen este mínimo de cuatro puertos, 150 kilovatios, cada 50 millas, ese dinero se puede flexionar para la carga necesaria, como la carga de Nivel 2. Así que entre NEVI y ahora con la [Infraestructura de carga y abastecimiento de combustible] subvenciones for community charging, it is specifically for urban and thinking about whether it's on street or off street, how do we provide people access to charging that don’t have it. 

Look at a city like New York, where 48 percent of people who own cars don't have a parking space and park on the street. We have to serve everybody, not just some people. Placement of those chargers looks pretty different — it may look a little bit more like bike share stations, where you try to have them every five minutes in terms of walking. So the planning and the implementation in urban areas looks considerably different than rural and highway.

Fehrenbacher: La confiabilidad de la carga pública ha sido un problema creciente. ¿La oficina conjunta está ayudando a abordar eso a través de algunos de estos programas?

Klein: Yes, so we actually put out a notice of intent about a month ago. One of the issues that we noted that we're going to be working on is reliability. It's, I would say, one of our top three areas of focus. We're actually working on standing up a reliability consortium, and we'll be putting out more information in a few weeks about that, working with industry, with governments, with nonprofits and advocates on how to very quickly increase reliability out there. Thinking sort of 80/20: What are the 20 percent of things leading to 80 percent of the failures? 

In general, we put out a standard for 97 percent reliability. Right now, one out of four stations being down on average — that will not be acceptable if you're going to accept federal funds.

But we don't just want to have a hammer, we want to have a carrot as well, right? And so we want to also work closely with industry to make sure that they can meet those standards. And we think that industry needs to work together versus view this as a competitive factor. So to meet 97 percent uptime, they're going to have to improve. The good news is there are folks out there that are above 97 percent right now. So we know it can be done. And we're going to work with everybody. That's our job, basically, to collaborate, convene, bring everybody with us in this big tent to get there.

Fehrenbacher: ¿Cuáles son los mayores desafíos de la oficina conjunta?

Klein: I think we have a number of challenges. There's macro challenges, right? There's the challenges of reliability and affordability. With the [Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA] and with [the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, or BIL], that really brings the cost down significantly, whether it's for the Chevy Bolt, now it's sub-$20,000, and people may think that EVs are sort of out of range for them. Or that we do have some 140,000 chargers out there. So we're working fast, there's a lot of great stuff happening. 

But I think creating awareness, changing the perception, is important. That's going to happen over the next couple of years. And I think it's going to happen naturally, if we do a great job. 

So our job is … to be honest, transparent about the state of affairs today but also to create awareness about all the great things that are happening and how fast the shift is happening. And that the future is bright. And we're here to support that. 

We have these amazing resources across the federal government and in the NGO sector. We have the best entrepreneurs in the world, not to disparage any other country, but let's be honest: When you think about tech, electrification, we excel in this country. You put all those folks together to solve problems, whether it's with the reliability consortium or the federal advisory working group that we're standing up, there's nothing that we can't do. 

We have these huge challenges, but these gigantic opportunities as well. And I think the great thing that the administration is doing is that they're being very straightforward and clear about timelines and goals. So having 50 percent of light duty vehicles sold be electric by 2030 means you need to have 500,000 plus public charging stations out there. We're going to need 10’s of millions of private stations out there.

Fehrenbacher: What's more challenging, starting a new business as an entrepreneur or starting a new collaborative federal office?

Klein: It's different. One of the things that I've noted in business is that you have complete control over things for the most part, but you don't typically have the resources that you do in government. The challenge sometimes with government is having people above you that are not willing to work as fast as you want to work sort of at an entrepreneur's speed. So I call myself an intrapreneur within government, and I basically want to work at the fastest, humanly possible speed. 

What I've been excited about is that I've encountered the same people in this government and in this office — not everybody; I mean, there's bureaucracy, right? It's challenging. It's not like working at the city level where you're actually putting in the stations on the ground.

Pero cuando observa el alcance del control y la capacidad de afectar un cambio positivo, no solo a nivel nacional, sino internacional. Básicamente, la Unión Europea presentó su propio programa tipo NEVI basado en nuestro programa, por lo que cuando hacemos algo y afecta al resto del mundo, eso también se siente genial.

Me llamo un intraemprendedor dentro del gobierno, y básicamente quiero trabajar a la velocidad más rápida humanamente posible.

So day to day, sometimes you wish you could move just faster, faster, faster. But there's a reason why we move at a measured pace as well. And we really are focused on getting things right.

It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to get it right. So we’ve got to get it right. And that means listening to a lot of people.

Fehrenbacher: Gabe, you said that you've been looking at how some other countries have deployed EV charging, like Norway. What are some lessons you've learned from other countries that you think would be applicable to deploy through the joint office?

Klein: If you look at the BIL and IRA, in some ways they were crafted after some of the incentives in Northern Europe. I do also want to caveat that, when you look at a country like Norway, it’s got 5.3 million people, which is about as big as South Carolina, which is like our 23rd most populous state. So our challenges are a little bit different, because we're not as homogenous. 

We’re like 100 Norways. We're very context-sensitive here. The needs of Wyoming or North Dakota are going to be different than Washington, D.C., Miami, etc. Having said that, we can absolutely learn from them. 

Están sucediendo algunas cosas interesantes con los cargadores basados ​​en postes en Ámsterdam y el Reino Unido, donde se ve una implementación rápida y un costo más bajo. 

There's interesting business models. You see aggregators, for instance, [that enable] payment [services] that ride on top of maybe the seven to 12 most popular [electric vehicle service providers]. Then you can have one app and use all the stations. 

Or even the work that we did with a lot of other folks in the government to help open up the Tesla network, for instance. That's something that Tesla had already done in Norway and other countries. So I think we're always learning.

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• Fuente: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/conversation-gabe-klein