UC Berkeley Law's Center for Law, Energy and the Environment (CLEE) just released a symposium brief on the lessons learned for electric vehicle deployment in France and California, based on the discussion at our June 2019 international conference at UC Berkeley, co-sponsored by CentraleSupélec and Florence School of Regulation (FSR) in France.
Electric Vehicles and Global Urban Adoption: Policy Solutions from France and California can be downloaded here, and you can read CLEE Director of the Climate Program Ethan Elkind’s blog post on the release.
Speakers and audience members identified the following challenges to greater EV deployment in France and California, also summarized in the report:
- Lack of access to affordable, convenient private electric vehicles;
- Complexity and cost of installing charging in urban settings and existing multifamily buildings;
- Declining federal incentives and insufficient vehicle demand;
- Electricity rate design decreases the financial viability of charging stations;
- Difficulty of adopting optimal charging practices that could benefit users and electric utilities;
- Difficulty of adopting optimal charging practices that could benefit users and electric utilities; and
- Need for grid infrastructure upgrades to avoid high costs on first-movers.
Conference speakers discussed top priority solutions, as the report details, including:
- National and state governments could require owners of existing multifamily buildings to install charging stations;
- National and state governments could assist transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft in encouraging electric vehicle adoption among their drivers, through support for the deployment of fast-charging hubs, driver education programs, and new pilot projects; and
- Electric utilities and regulators could develop new rate designs to incentivize charging while optimizing grid efficiency.