Focused on Justice40 communities, we aim to reduce the transportation cost burden and make EV ownership accessible to all. By developing scalable business models, this initiative ensures that everyone, regardless of income or housing type, can benefit from clean energy and mobility advancements.
The Opportunity
- Lower-income households spend over $100 billion per year on gasoline - 14% of monthly household income, compared to just 4% of income for higher income households (ACEEE)
- The transition from gasoline to electricity creates a powerful opportunity to cut this burden in half based on data on average fuel cost savings (Atlas Public Policy; Univ. of Michigan)
- Electric utilities are strongly situated to deliver these benefits - unlike gasoline retailers, utilities have longstanding universal service obligations and low-income programs
GRID Alternatives' approach to equitable clean mobility
The Challenge
- Lower-income households face the most barriers to unlocking this opportunity - in addition to the cost barriers of buying an EV, lower-income Americans disproportionately live in multifamily rental housing and lack access to low-cost, convenient home charging
- Drivers dependent on public EV charging pay 2-6 times more to “fill up”, which can erase the fuel cost savings for the very folks who need it the most (UC Institute for Transportation Studies)
- While many of these households are eligible for discounted home electric rates, they often can’t use these discounts to reduce the cost of charging since they can’t charge at home
Join the Community of Practice
The Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) has partnered with GRID Alternatives to launch a Community of Practice with support from the federal Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which will bring utilities together to share lessons learned in the equitable, EV charging space for low-income renters. Some participants will develop and launch new business models for enabling equitable access to EV charging for low-income renters while others will bring forth lessons learned and share best practices.
Who should participate? Publicly-owned utilities, investor-owned utilities, rural electric cooperatives, community choice aggregators, and LSE adjacent ecosystem partners are all invited to participate in the Community of Practice.
About the Program
GRID Alternatives is operating this program in partnership with Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA), Drive Clean Colorado, and EVNoire. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Award Number DE-EE0011243.
Key supporters of the project include General Motors and the Rivian Foundation.
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Join the Community of Practice!
Reach out to Ashley Lynn Qua at aqua@sepapower.org for more information.
Legal Notice
The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Energy or the United States Government.