Can Los Angeles Become a Capital of Electric Mobility?

An interview with the Transportation Electrification Partnership’s Alex Mitchell

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Can Los Angeles Become a Capital of Electric Mobility?

I’ve been interested in Los Angeles’s work on transport decarbonization for the last several years. If you haven’t taken a look at LA’s Green New Deal, you should. On transportation, it gets a lot right, including setting ambitious targets both for electrifying mobility and investing in public transit. 

LA is also home to the Transport Electrification Partnership (TEP), a unique public-private collaboration housed at the Los Angeles CleanTech Incubator (LACI). It has a carefully thought through roadmap you can dive into here.

I caught up with Alex Mitchell who leads this initiative to learn more about what they’re up to. 

Andrew Salzberg: What is the Transportation Electrification Partnership? How did it get started?

Alex Mitchell: The Transportation Electrification Partnership is a 30 member public-private partnership with the objective of rapidly scaling electrification in the LA region, using the 2028 Olympics as a moment to define LA as a capital of electric mobility. 

It was started a little over two years ago after Matt Peterson joined as LACI CEO. He had previously been the first chief Sustainability Officer of the city of LA and spent a lot of his time working on various initiatives to scale electrification, including the Blue LA car sharing program and the commitment by the ports of LA and Long Beach to go one hundred percent zero emissions by 2035. One of the things he realized during his time as the chief sustainability officer of the city of LA is how hard it is to get electrification of transportation to scale. So as he came over to LACI from the mayor's office, he saw an opportunity to use LACI's convening power to gather a group of public and private sector entities who all share a common desire to rapidly scale electrification and actually work through the challenges as a team. 

A critical early part of the work you did was modeling pathways to your target reductions. Can you tell us more about how you set your targets, and how you decided which strategies - mode shift, freight electrification, passenger electrification, etc. were going to play what role? 

In the first six months of the partnership, we got alignment on a 25% reduction in GHG and air pollutants by 2028 above and beyond existing commitments [ed. note: this is significant, because things like LA’s Green New Deal already have ambitious targets baked in]. 

Modeling the emissions pathways to hit that target was a mix of art and science. We started with an inventory of all the sources of CO2 by transportation within LA county: heavy duty and medium duty trucks, passenger cars, both shared and privately owned, all that sort of stuff. Then we ran 45 different scenarios. And you get a sense pretty quickly of what your big picture levers are. 

On some of them, the pathways are more political than technical. Take passenger car electrification. The consensus among those in the room - including OEMs - was that by 2028 EVs are going to be cheaper than internal combustion engine vehicles, so it's more of an issue of just political will, rather than skill. 

On the heavy duty side, there were still a lot of questions about the technology itself. And so we ran an RFI to get a sense of the state of the clean trucking industry both today and in the run up to our 2028 goals. That RFI gave us a lot more confidence that by 2021-2022, we'd have a pretty broad commercial offering of clean trucks. It also gave us a whole lot of insights about charging solutions, including for specific use cases around things like drayage. 

Then we started eliminating and refining some of our original 45 pathways. We were refining the model weekly with a broad mix of actors, from BMW, Southern California Edison [the local utility], LA Metro [the local transit agency], and the California Air Resources Board. All of them could look at the data and say, “that doesn't feel technologically feasible”, or that does and here's why. That got us to a shared understanding of the trade offs. 

Some scenarios were ruled out from a political perspective. Nobody saw the political will for a  vehicle scrappage scheme where gasoline powered vehicles were just banished from the road in the early 2020s, for example. So given how long vehicles stay on the road, the only way to get to our goals was by incorporating mode shift along with vehicle technology changes. That’s the kind of calculation we were making.

So how does TEP hope to get these changes to happen? Is it pilots? Lobbying for policy changes?

The first year and a half was dedicated to setting the targets. What that did was build this incredible amount of connective tissue between these entities where they feel co ownership of these targets. They weren't just unilaterally handed down by LACI, they were co created. 

One way we’re executing on those is, yes, pilots. First, we’re focused on community pilots in disadvantaged areas. [ed note: see next question for more details]

We are also focused on pilots for market deployment. One example is that we’re working on accelerating zero emission goods movement along the I-710, which is the main highway that leaves the ports of LA and Long Beach. It's one of the most polluted corridors in the nation and a real blight on the communities who live there. We looked at different technologies that might accelerate zero emission transportation in this corridor, including overhead catenary charging, battery electric trucks, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. In the short term, battery electric seems like the winner, though there are potential roles for hydrogen fuel cells in longer range trucking. Catenary charging seems further off than we need for our purposes. We’ve been diving deep on specific sites in the I-710 corridor for different forms of potential charging.

Another type of pilot is like what we're doing in Santa Monica with the zero emissions delivery zone, which is meant to really experiment with business models and public policy. 

We’re also, as you say, pushing for new policies. A great example of that was our federal stimulus letter. One thing that’s particularly interesting in that letter is to see BMW and Nissan advocating for public transportation and cycling infrastructure. I think that stems, partly, from having the connective tissue and the shared understanding of the goals that we got to. It allows someone like Nissan to be able to go “No, this is really important. We can't get to our goals without mode shift.” It’s kind of exciting to have a car company saying that.

One of the crises of our time is racial injustice, and renewed awareness around it in the US sparked by the killing of George Floyd. There's plenty of criticism that vehicle electrification is just about wealthy folks driving Teslas. How are you not doing that? 

Well, one of the ways is by making sure that we have true engagement on the public side of really a broad and diverse set of cities. So we've added a couple of cities along the way who are now deeply engaged in the partnership and that includes cities like Inglewood. It's a city that's really got a lot on its plate and they have a huge opportunity in front of them with the Olympics and hosting the opening ceremony. How can we support them in embedding electrification in their community between now and then? 

And then I think the second answer is how we go about pilots. We’ve been very intentional in working on pilots in disadvantaged communities. We've just launched an off grid car sharing program in Pacoima. We have an e-cargo bike pilot in Long Beach and we're just about to launch an EV car sharing program in San Pedro, which is right next to Long Beach. So the pilot program's focus has really been on those disadvantaged communities. 

And I think what's interesting about that is it's actually brought up a whole host of interesting adaptations for startups to engage on. So in the Pacoima pilot, for example, we’re working with one of our portfolio companies Envoy carsharing, to have a mechanism for engaging with the unbanked. That’s the kind of work they can then take to other communities.

How has COVID-19 changed the plans, if at all?

It’s had us taking a hard look at our mode shift goals. In our model, we targeted a rise in both active and public transit. Active transit - biking, walking, etc - is by all accounts doing a lot better than anybody was expecting a year ago. You look at the sale of e-bikes, for example. But we’re certainly seeing challenges on public transit ridership, as we all know.  

So we’re trying to adjust our thinking on both topics. What’s the potential upside for, say, e-biking that we hadn’t anticipated before? But also, what’s the short and medium term future of public and shared transit? I don't think we have a hypothesis on the net CO2 impact of those changes yet.

If I'm in a city in North America, what can I take away from what you guys are doing if I want to do something similar? 

What I would say is, you definitely want to have a couple of anchor public organizations and a couple of anchor private organizations signed on early. On this topic, the utility is a pretty good one to have. They have a long term interest in this topic and oftentimes are required by legal obligation to engage in some way, but they don't know how to get it done. You're asking them to do something that's outside their historical zone of operation. So that's probably a good entity to start with. 

For us, having those first couple of marquee partners was really helpful. On the utility side that was LADWP and Edison. And on the private sector side, it was BMW. They stepped up and said, “this is one of our largest markets in the world, we're deeply committed to electrification, and we want to understand how it's working here and how we can help accelerate it.” That was a big moment for us.

New & Worth a Read

• In California, the big climate news (before the fires) was a debate about the role of renewables (if any) in massive blackouts. Mass adoption of EVs might actually help address this in the future. 

• Redlining and increasing temperatures overlap to devastating effect. 

• The European Union may propose even more ambitious emissions cuts by 2030.

• Senate Democrats release their climate action plan. Lots to like on transportation. Compare with past House and Biden plans here.

• The IEA releases an analysis on the CO2 impact of working from home.

• Where (in the US) should we focus our efforts on zero emission trucks? Regional haul, says Rocky Mountain Institute. Related: electric vans for last mile delivery are coming.

• What’s the fuel of the future for ships? Related - short explainer from Vaclav Smil on why battery electric container ships won’t work.

Till Next Time,

Andrew