AGENDA
2025 PLMA EV Symposium

Description coming soon.

Electric vehicles are rapidly integrating into the grid, presenting a significant opportunity for utilities to leverage their flexibility for grid services. Interoperability is critical to unlocking their full potential. The industry is in its early stages and OEMs have taken a highly varied approach toward EV managed charging programs. This session, featuring Enode, ev.energy, and Optiwatt alongside Con Edison and Avangrid, will move beyond buzzwords to explore how a collaborative, inclusive, and diversified approach is required to tackle interoperability challenges in order to provide cost-effective, scalable solutions for all EV drivers. We will explore the diverse integration strategies being utilized to enable EV flexibility at scale today, and what is needed to ensure equity, accessibility, and innovation across the ecosystem.

Cadmus leads the third-party evaluation of over $700 million in charging infrastructure spending for four California utilities—SCE, PG&E, SDG&E, and Liberty, with most of that funding targeted towards medium-to-heavy-duty (MDHD) fleets. Objectives of the evaluation include assessing whether the utilities’ program investments in TE accelerate the market, whether the TE investments maximized benefits and minimized costs, including co-benefits (e.g., reduced fumes, less ambient noise, and improvements to health, safety, foot traffic) and co-costs (e.g., impact on parking spaces, labor impacts, difficulty incorporating electric vehicles into operations), and integrating learnings from analysis of program activities to develop recommendations. Michael Colby, Project Manager of this multi-year evaluation, will present lessons learned and findings specific to the grid impacts (including load curves, charging flexibility, and charging optimization) of these programs.

A lot can change with EV load management programs in a New York minute. This panel will bring together New York utilities for a no-nonsense discussion covering a leading-edge portfolio of EV load management solutions that deliver customer savings and grid flexibility. The conversation will compare and contrast the experiences across each of the companies’ vastly different service territories as they implement similar behavioral, rate, rebate, and upfront incentives to support load management and cost relief for residential and commercial EV charging customers including public, workplace, multifamily, and medium- and heavy-duty fleets. Presenters will share what’s in store for the next phase of New York’s robust and growing portfolio of load management programs.

The abstract presents a useful practical topic from a highly credible source, applicable to utilities seeking to add value for commercial fleet operators. It offers insights from practical experience and demonstrates alignment across multiple stakeholder phases. The content highlights solutions for flexible interconnection while embracing transportation electrification—providing actionable approaches for utilities navigating the evolving electric vehicle landscape.

California Energy Commission has funded 10 “Responsive, Easy Charging Products With Dynamic Signals (REDWDS)” projects to demonstrate and deploy EV charging products that can respond to dynamic grid signals. Three REDWDS projects have significant bidirectional charging scope led by Kaluza, Bidirectional Energy, and dcbel. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is funded by Southern California Edison to work with these three bidirectional charging technology providers to document their use cases, approaches to communicate grid and price signals, charging control and optimization, customer experience, interoperability features, and up-to-date progress and challenges in their projects. San Diego Gas and Electric has also been working with these REDWDS projects to showcase value stack for scaling. In addition, SDG&E is demonstrating using bidirectional community EV charging and discharging along with solar and battery to backup critical local water supply loads during Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events.

Real-time pricing and dynamic rates are transforming EV charging behavior, offering greater load flexibility and easing grid stress. However, as EV Managed Charging programs expand and rate structures grow more complex, measuring and verifying program impacts becomes challenging. Traditional techniques used for flat or TOU rates often fail under dynamic pricing. This session explores insights from ComEd’s Residential Optimized Charging (ROC) pilot, where Optiwatt and Opinion Dynamics are advancing Measurement Verification strategies tailored for real-time rate environments. Using early results from over 1,000 vehicles, we’ll show how ROC is developing smarter frameworks to: design effective managed charging programs, define peak windows based on price signals, and build counterfactuals using real-time telematics rather than assumptions. As dynamic pricing becomes the norm, evolving approaches will be essential to accurately assess the true impact of EV charging programs and to distinguish the benefits of active vs. passive load management.

How well do you know your EV program’s participants? This workshop will help attendees understand more about drivers in EV managed charging programs, including why they enroll, what types of programs they’re drawn to, what their expectations are, how incentives influence participation, and the most effective communication channels for engagement. It will also examine why drivers opt out or leave programs and explore strategies for re-engagement. Using an interactive format and real-world data, participants will collaborate to identify best practices for reaching diverse EV drivers to scale programs. Attendees will learn proven strategies to boost enrollments, decrease opt-outs, and create engaging, driver-centric programs.

As EV adoption accelerates, many regulators and utility executives remain skeptical of managed charging’s value—leading to underfunded, small-scale programs that miss the opportunity to contain rising grid costs. What’s been absent is a rigorous, bottom-up quantification of the value smart charging can unlock compared to unmanaged charging scenarios.This analysis presents a 10-year value stack, beginning at the transformer level and scaling through feeders, substations, and up to system-wide benefits. We quantify avoided infrastructure upgrades, improved renewable integration, energy savings, and potential ancillary service value—totaling over $100 billion. In addition, there are tens of billions in customer bill savings, environmental and health benefits, and economic multiplier effects. The results offer utilities a credible, data-driven case and methodology to take to regulators, boards, and executives—demonstrating that smart charging isn’t just beneficial, it’s essential. Without it, the road ahead brings higher grid costs, local overloads, and rising rates.

This presentation summarizes a high-resolution, forward-looking dataset of EV adoption, EV charging, and managed charging resource. Vehicle-level data are grounded in current adoption and charging patterns, and ~200,000 real-world vehicle-weeks of travel data covering all on-road segments (i.e., light-duty, transit and school buses, local, regional and long-haul medium- and heavy-duty). The data, which include multiple charging profiles per vehicle to bound flexibility, are then processed and aggregated to describe baseline charging and charge management resource by county, hour, year, scenario, and vehicle type. Coupled with one of four scenarios of how EV managed charging costs might evolve over time, the dataset enables a power sector capacity expansion model to select cost-optimal quantities of EV managed charging and supply-side resources to reliably satisfy demand. Five integration strategies: Baseline, Daytime and Flat (passive), Flex (active), and Stress (anti-strategy), illustrate how baseline charging and flexibility potential changes with EVSE build-out and charging preferences.

Octopus Energy’s “Electroverse” is an e-Mobility Service Provider (eMSP) with nearly 1 million users, providing access to 950,000+ public chargers across 1,100+ public charging networks in 33 countries using a single mobile app. Electroverse worked with Centre for Net Zero in the UK to trial first-of-its-kind dynamic pricing to test shifting public EV charging behavior. Offering up to 40% discounts during periods of abundant clean energy led to a doubling of charging vs. control groups, demonstrating significant price elasticity on certain days and periods of time. Trials also showed “demand creation,” indicating higher charging demand exists at dynamic pricing than at static rates. This suggests large, untapped potential for aligning charging with low-cost, low-carbon energy. The presentation will detail trial methodology and results, discuss implications for influencing EV charging behavior, explore US applications and propose approaches for utilities and chargepoint operators to test elasticity and drive utilization.