TSRC

Electric Vehicle Charge Management Strategies to Benefit the California Electricity Grid

Tim Lipman
Yuhao Yuan
2025

Recent studies suggest that there could be significant value to electric vehicle (EV) drivers and power companies from incorporating EVs into the state’s electrical power grids, known as Vehicle-Grid Integration (VGI). However, the benefits could be highly variable depending on the location of the utility territory, vehicle type and battery capacity, the relevant timeframe, and whether the connection involves only managed charging or includes bidirectional charging permitting vehicle to grid (V2G) power transfer, and other factors. Various studies conducted to date generally conclude that...

Multifamily Households Across California are Paying a Lot More to Charge Their Electric Vehicle

Diya Kandhra
Dwight MacCurdy
Tim Lipman
2024

To better understand inequities in EV charging costs, we compared charging costs at public EV DCFC stations to the cost for single-family housing (SFH) residents charging at home for three California electric utility service areas, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), San Diego Gas and Electric Company (SDG&E) and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), and for three specific urban areas - Sacramento, San Diego, and San Jose. We used a combination of observed pricing data from PlugShare, a crowd-sourced database of public EV charging, and public DCFC pricing...

Moving Beyond the Colors: The Full Life-Cycle Emissions of Hydrogen Production Pathways for California

Tim Lipman
Pablo Busch
Stephanie Collins
Arpad Horvath
Alissa Kendall
Daniel Coffee
David Kong
2024

There is growing interest in the use of hydrogen as a transportation fuel but the environmental benefits of using hydrogen depend critically on how it is produced and distributed. Leading alternatives to using fossil natural gas to make hydrogen through the conventional method of steam methane reforming include using electrolyzers to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the use of biogas as an alternative feedstock to fossil natural gas. This report examines the latest carbon intensity (CI) estimates for these and various other hydrogen production processes, adding important nuances...

A Systematic Review of Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Intensity Values for Hydrogen Production Pathways

P Busch
A Kendall
Tim Lipman
2023

Hydrogen is a potential low-carbon energy carrier to replace fossil fuels, especially in industrial and transportation applications where decarbonization is particularly challenging. Hydrogen can be generated via several feedstocks and technology combinations (pathways) that result in different life cycle greenhouse gas emissions intensities, thus policies and investments intended to deploy hydrogen as a climate solution must differentiate among pathways. To collect and analyze current estimates of the life cycle greenhouse gas intensity of hydrogen pathways, a systematic scholarly...

Zero-Emission Bus Implementation Guidebook for California Transit Fleets

Tim Lipman
Emily Rogers
2023

Transit bus operations in California are experiencing new challenges due to economic conditions and the ongoing global pandemic. A confluence of factors has created a focus on this critical public-needs serving industry, due to state and local efforts to reduce emissions of pollutants and climate-changing gases. Transit bus operations in California provide essential and additional useful services that offer critical mobility to needy populations (elderly and handicapped) as well as many other groups for whom transit buses provide the most economical, convenient, and low-emission options....

Comprehensive Review of California's Innovative Clean Transit Regulation: Phase I Summary Report

Matthew Jeffers
Kenneth Kelly
Tim Lipman
Andre Fernandes Tomon Avelino
Caley Johnson
Mengming Li
Matthew Post
Yimin Zhang
2022

This report–prepared by NREL and UC Berkeley for the California Air Resources Board (CARB)–provides a comprehensive review conducted for implementation of the Innovative Clean Transit (ICT) regulation and deployment of zero-emission transit buses in California. The ICT regulation requires California transit agencies to begin transitioning to zero-emission vehicle technologies, defining an increasing percentage of new bus purchases that must be zero-emission buses (ZEBs) each year. The purchase requirements begin in 2023, increasing to a 100% ZEB purchase requirement beginning in 2029. This...

Hydrogen Can Have a Much Lower Carbon Intensity than Fossil Fuels But This Largely Depends on How It Is Produced and Distributed

Tim Lipman
Arpad Horvath
Stephanie Collins
Allisa Kendall
Lewis Fulton
Pablo Busch
2022

As interest in hydrogen as an energy carrier has increased, the various ways that hydrogen is made are being categorized as “green,” “blue,” “gray,” and other colors in relation to their environmental impact. While these categorizations are somewhat useful to indicate the environmental and climate change impacts of different production pathways, they are not especially useful for policy making or industry decisionmaking purposes because they are subjective. For example, most definitions of green pathways for hydrogen production only include electrolysis from renewable electricity sources;...

Challenges and Opportunities of Integrating Electric Vehicles in Electricity Distribution Systems

Nadia Panossian
Matteo Muratori
Bryan Palmintier
Andrew Meintz
Tim Lipman
Keith Moffat
2022

Increased charging needs from widespread adoption of battery electric vehicles (EVs) will impact electricity demand. This will likely require a combination of potentially costly distribution infrastructure upgrades and synergistic grid-transportation solutions such as managed charging and strategic charger placement. Fully implementing such strategic planning and control methods—including business models and mechanisms to engage and compensate consumers—can minimize or even eliminate required grid upgrades. Moreover, there are also opportunities for EV charging to support the grid by...

A Low-Complexity Non-Intrusive Approach to Predict the Energy Demand of Buildings over Short-Term Horizons

Athanasios Aris Panagopoulos
Filippos Christianos
Michail Katsigiannis
Konstantinos Mykoniatis
Marco Pritoni
Orestis Panagopoulos
Therese Peffer
Georgios Chalkiadakis
David Culler
Nicholas Jennings
Tim Lipman
2022

Reliable, non-intrusive, short-term (of up to 12 h ahead) prediction of a building's energy demand is a critical component of intelligent energy management applications. A number of such approaches have been proposed over time, utilizing various statistical and, more recently, machine learning techniques, such as decision trees, neural networks and support vector machines. Importantly, all of these works barely outperform simple seasonal auto-regressive integrated moving average models, while their complexity is significantly higher. In this work, we propose a novel low-complexity non-...

Advanced Materials Supply Considerations for Electric Vehicle Applications

Tim Lipman
Petra Maier
2021

Electric vehicles are now proliferating based on technologies and components that in turn rely on the use of strategic materials and mineral resources. This review article discusses critical materials considerations for electric drive vehicles, focusing on the underlying component technologies and materials. These mainly include materials for advanced batteries, motors and electronics, lightweight structures, and other components specific to each vehicle type. Particularly strategic and widely used minerals and elements/structures for electric vehicles include nickel, cobalt, rare-earth...