Last summer, bus manufacturer Zum announced the launch of a virtual power plant made up of the largest electric school bus fleet in the country. Together with the Oakland Unified School District in California and Pacific Gas & Electric, Zum worked to integrate the buses into the local grid.
With their short, predictable routes and ability to send power to the grid during peak demand periods, electric school buses make perfect sense for vehicle-grid integration. Rudi Halbright, PG&E’s expert product manager of vehicle-grid integration, says the challenge is teaching customers how to rethink their relationship with vehicles and power bills.
“Not only are we introducing people to a new way of using vehicles to provide energy and having them think differently about their vehicles, we’re also introducing this idea of hourly flexible pricing,” Halbright said on the With Great Power podcast. That concept, he added, “is new to most customers, is a little anxiety producing to many,” and also “adds complexity.”
Still, he says the Zum project is a key early milestone for the utility as it works toward its goal to power three million EVs by 2030 — with two million of those serving as flexible load through vehicle-grid integration applications.
Navigating evolving standards
For the Zum project, Halbright orchestrated the installation of bidirectional chargers to support 74 electric school buses at a depot in Oakland, as well as grid-following inverters to bring the battery’s direct current to alternating current and sync up at the same frequency. “So as the grid fluctuates, they can match it and meet it where it is,” he said.
But still-evolving standards for smart inverters, as well as pandemic-related supply chain delays, stymied the project. The partners ultimately ironed out those problems in time for the 2024-2025 school year — but Halbright said he is still concerned that standards development is slowing vehicle-grid projects more broadly.
”While we’re fortunate that the TELUS charger that Zum is using has received certification now, some of the equipment we might otherwise be using on other projects has not gotten that certification yet,” he said. “Certification can take anywhere from months to years. So that’s been a big challenge.”
Hardware isn’t the only challenge
By participating in California’s Emergency Load Response Program, Zum was able to earn up to $2 per kilowatt-hour of energy that its buses sent to the grid during periods of high demand. And because Zum can export up to two and a half megawatts of energy, “we’re talking [about] quite a significant contribution to their bottom line,” Halbright said.
But outside of that incentive, determining pricing models for fleet owners has been tough. “We’re early in our ability to accurately communicate how much of an earnings opportunity there is for customers,” he said.
V2G participants already reckoning with the costs and complexity of electrification want clarity on that opportunity. Customers can make money or significantly lower their energy bills with an electric fleet, but timing is critical.
“Because once they’ve already done their trenching, installed unidirectional chargers, it’s really less likely to be worth it for them to do it over again,” Halbright said. That said, he’s hopeful that the benefits of the program will soon become clear to all.
”I keep focused on the goals, what we’re trying to achieve, and [keep] committed that we’re going to go there,” he said. “We’re depending on this to make a big impact.”
For the full conversation with Rudi Halbright, listen to his interview on season 4 of With Great Power.
This is partner content, brought to you by GridX. It borrows from an interview that appeared on With Great Power, a Latitude Studios partner podcast.
With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.
Transcript
Brad Langley: In the fifth grade, Rudi Halbright came up with an unusual science fair project.
Rudi Halbright: I had read about the idea of solar, thermal solar water heating, and had the idea to do a solar-powered home.
Brad Langley: This was back in the late ’70s, so Rudi couldn’t just 3-D print the parts he needed for his project. He had to get creative, so he started looking around the house.
Rudi Halbright: My mom had this tanning kind of lamp that we never used otherwise, that I envisioned we could use as the artificial sun and build the house and have water flowing through a sort of radiator on the roof.
Brad Langley: It was the kind of thinking that makes total sense for someone who would end up working in electrification decades later. But Rudi admits at the time it was a little ambitious.
Rudi Halbright: I had a hard time sourcing some of the materials and was searching for the pumps that I would need and never quite got it all working.
Brad Langley: So unfortunately, no blue ribbon at that science fair. But the seed was planted.
Rudi Halbright: The idea of having energy that was just available that you could harness, that was really interesting to me. It was a bit more exciting than a volcano made with vinegar and baking soda.
Brad Langley: Years later, Rudi’s interests would shift to data science. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, he spent the first 10 years of his career working as an IT solutions developer for companies in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors, but it just wasn’t his calling.
Rudi Halbright: It had never been everything that I wanted to do, but it was something I was really good at, fell easily into, and it was a lot of work.
Brad Langley: That is until there wasn’t. In 2000, Rudi was let go from an IT consultancy, along with two thirds of his coworkers. It was part of a larger wave of industry-wide layoffs across the US.
Rudi Halbright: I remember going to this outplacement counseling that my now former employer had covered the cost of for everybody, and I think I was the only one who wasn’t sure why I was there because I had no interest in getting another job like the one I had. I was ready for a change.
Brad Langley: That change ended up being a second career as a professional photographer. He shot weddings, events, even underwater portraits. It was about as far from data science as he could get, but around that same time, his childhood interest in clean energy was resurfacing.
Rudi Halbright: I had been interested in renewable energy and electric vehicles for quite a while at that point, but hadn’t quite seen my path to make it a career.
Brad Langley: It took earning an MBA focused on the intersection of renewable energy and electric vehicle infrastructure to get Rudi back into the electrification space.
Rudi Halbright: It was a way to bring some things that I was excited about — and saw as a big part of the solution — together.
Brad Langley: So in 2012, Rudi took his newly earned degree and went to work as an EV charging consultant. From there, he joined PG&E, where he now runs a vehicle-to-grid deployment project with Zum, a school bus company in Oakland, California. It’s the largest all-electric school bus fleet in the US. And for PG&E, it’s an important early move towards the utility’s decarbonization goals.
Rudi Halbright: We know that we’re going to have a mandate to have all our vehicles for sale being electric, which is to have by 2030, three million electric vehicles in our service territory, and to have two million out of those three participating in some sort of flexible load. So I think of it as our best solution, in terms of our cost and the value to customers, and therefore, the best way to keep our rates low. So, that’s a big commitment and we’re depending on this to make a big impact.
Brad Langley: This is With Great Power, a show about the people building the future grid today. I’m Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don’t innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting-edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable, and customer-centric.
Today my guest is Rudi Halbright. He’s an expert Product Manager of Vehicle Grid Integration at PG&E. For the Zum bus project, he managed the installation of bidirectional chargers to support 74 electric buses that form a VPP. So, we delve into some of the intricacies of that project, from the hardware to rate design.
I started my conversation with Rudi by asking why electric buses work so well for V2G.
Rudi Halbright: Well, they’re kind of the perfect example because they’re used for relatively small periods of the day, parked for long periods that coincide both with when the sun’s shining, as well as being parked for most of the time when we have people coming home from work turning on their air conditioners, using electric appliances in their kitchens more and more. And so they’re pretty much done by around 4:00 PM on a typical day, and then even better in the summer, they’re scarcely used at all. They’re also very predictable because they have fixed routes, you know when it’s going to be available and you can rely on them.
Brad Langley: And maybe go into a bit more detail and walk me through what other technology elements or part of orchestrating or are part of orchestrating this project.
Rudi Halbright: Well, there’s the chargers, there’s inverters, which are what are going to bring the voltage from the battery in the DC format to AC, and in this case AC at 480 volts. They’re also matching with the grid, so they’re grid following inverters, so they’re syncing up at the same frequency and they’re somewhat dynamic in their ability to do that. So as the grid fluctuates, they can match it and meet it where it is. The chargers themselves have the ability to allow the energy to flow in both directions.
Beyond that, we have some additional equipment that we’re using that’s not necessarily used in every installation, but because of the amount of energy that we’re having both in terms of charging and discharging, we have real-time access to the total amount of energy that’s moving with a telemetry solution, that actually takes a feed from each charger and sends that wirelessly.
Brad Langley: And I assume this is all pretty seamless for the school district. Is there a kind of behind-the-scenes work that they are responsible for, to participate in this program, or is it as simple as driving the bus, coming back, charging it, and PG&E and Zum handle everything else behind-the-scenes?
Rudi Halbright: Pretty much the latter. In this case, I think of Zum as providing a bus fleet as a service to the school district. So they’re running the buses and they’re providing the service based on the needs that the school district has. I know there’s been some significant changes they have been able to make as the result of the software that they use to manage all of this, down to the point of they have gotten the wait times to well below a minute. Meaning, students know exactly when that bus is going to be there to pick them up.
Brad Langley: So pulling a project like this together, there’s a lot of moving pieces. There’s a lot of people and different companies and entities and technologies involved. Talk us through the major parties and funders that had to come together to make this project happen.
Rudi Halbright: The Zum folks are the ones who are most involved with the funding. From ours, we have provided funding both from our fleets program, which covers the cost of some of the infrastructure on PG&E’s side of the meter, and all the upgrades that are necessary to allow them to have the service. We provide some additional incentives to defray the cost of the more expensive equipment required for bidirectional charging. And so beyond that, I know they had some federal monies that were received and some additional funding, but I can’t speak to that directly. I can say that the buses themselves are between two and a half and three times the price of diesel buses, so this funding is really important.
Brad Langley: And how did this project come together? Is this something that Zum came to you with? They started with the school district? Any insights you can give for other utilities or entities that might be looking to do similar projects? Where did this originate?
Rudi Halbright: Well, Zum came to us about well over two — closer to three — years ago, to first talk about this plan. And one of the things I give Zum a lot of credit for is they got in touch with us and worked with us really early, got engagement, effectively became partners with us, because and that’s the reality of what’s possible in these relationships. We’re not just the utility providing a service to them, because they’re also helping us meet our goals, and those goals are helping us meet California’s goals. So we’re really together on this. We’re really partners trying to achieve these common benefits. So, they approached us that way and built relationships at multiple levels through PG&E. And I think that made for not only success, but a much faster process to implement this.
Brad Langley: And in California, the PUC has created what’s called the Emergency Load Reduction Program, which is a way for utilities to pay businesses to either reduce load or send electricity to the grid during emergencies. Can you spend a few minutes talking about how Zum is using that program and how it factors into the economics of those projects?
Rudi Halbright: Oh, yeah, it’s a huge factor in the economics. So there’s a number of groups within the Emergency Load Response Program, otherwise referred to as ELRP, and it provides compensation at up to $2 a kilowatt-hour, and that’s relative to a baseline measure of usage. In the case of exporting, since typically they’re not going to be exporting at that time of the day, during ELRP they do export and get the full $2 and then they’re guaranteed 30 hours a year. And so they were able to participate in most of those calls this year, and that is significant because they can export up to two and a half megawatts of energy. So we’re talking quite a significant contribution to their bottom line.
Brad Langley: Yeah, that’s an impressive number for sure. How are those events called? Is that just in interacting directly with the buses themselves or how does that process work?
Rudi Halbright: There’s a signaling mechanism that makes the information available that works with the parties who are involved with managing their charging and discharging, and it takes priority over our pilots. So when the ELRP event happens, that’s the first and highest priority. The way I like to look at it is, ELRP is designed to not just compensate energy at the value of what it’s worth to the grid, but to consider the value of keeping the lights on in California, when we might otherwise have a power outage or a brownout.
Brad Langley: It’s my understanding you may have encountered some unforeseen delays around hardware certifications. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Rudi Halbright: Yeah, that’s been a big challenge for our pilots, and that’s been both because of the time it’s taken for companies to adopt mandated standards, as well as supply chain delays. And in terms of the chargers themselves, there’s been a change in requirements from UL 1741 to UL 1741-SA, and then SB, each of which have additional requirements for smart inverters. And 1741 was the original one that handles safety, SA adds some additional functionality to better provide grid services, and then SB adds a little bit more of that, plus the ability to administer it all wirelessly. And during this process, SB became required. The good news is that we have an exception through ELRP, which allows equipment that hasn’t received that certification but has at least UL 1741, is able to be used. So that’s helped us quite a bit in being able to move forwards.
At the same time, there are products on the market that are new and hadn’t received any of those certifications. And while we’re fortunate that the TELUS charger that Zum is using has received certification now, some of the equipment we might otherwise be using on other projects has not gotten that certification yet, and that certification can take anywhere from months to years. And so that’s been a big challenge.
Brad Langley: So these chargers that were selected and used, are they novel chargers like they had not been used before? And are they specially designed to handle fleet electrification and/or vehicle to grid type of use cases?
Rudi Halbright: They are fairly new. What’s mostly different about them from other chargers that TELUS had done, is the form factor was designed in coordination with Zum so that it would fit in these cabinets that can hold one to four modules. So you could have potentially four buses surrounding a charger, all able to charge simultaneously. So that really can lower the cost significantly of the installation, rather than installing four separate devices effectively, because putting the one pedestal in and then they can add chargers to that pedestal.
So this version hadn’t received the UL certification and was pending and received it. And these are indeed, I mean, the chargers that are used for commercial purposes do tend to be different because they’re using three phase power at a higher voltage.
Brad Langley: Got it. What other types of fleets do you think work well for vehicle-to-grid?
Rudi Halbright: Everything from delivery and particular delivery that’s done earlier in the day. So that could be a bakery, that can be other food service delivery. That could be just business to business that’s done by 5:00 PM. So, those are good examples as would be drayage trucks. Garbage trucks are a really good example as well.
Brad Langley: How are you guys going about educating businesses that could be viable for this? Is this an option for them? And how can it benefit them?
Rudi Halbright: So I think it’s reaching out through our fleets program is the predominant one. Beyond that, it’s reaching out through the manufacturers who are making the vehicles, trying to find out who’s expressed interest in acquiring them. I mean, a big part of the challenge is getting in a relationship with these parties early enough in their process when they’re making the decisions about what equipment to purchase. Because once they’ve already done their trenching installed, unidirectional chargers, it’s really less likely to be worth it for them to do it over again.
Another challenge that affects it is that we’re early in our ability to accurately communicate how much of an earnings opportunity there is for customers. And as we’re able to get that information clearer, it’ll be a lot easier to make that case. And so giving a customer a sense of what’s realistic to earn in a given year and what kind of break-even opportunity is there, when can you start to expect actually making money? And with a lot of these companies, they’re quite challenged just by their initial goal of electrifying, getting the infrastructure they need working, and making sure they can get their deliveries done on time. And so in some cases, I was reaching out very early on to some companies that do very large scale delivery and they were years from being ready to talk about vehicle-to-grid.
Brad Langley: I want to go back to something you mentioned real quick, around being able to communicate what customers are likely to save based on when they charge by participating in these programs. And you had made reference that you guys aren’t quite able to kind of match those price signals just yet. What steps are you all taking to be able to match the price signals so you can give a better understanding of where that cost savings is going to come from or how much it will eventually cost them by participating or save them by participating in these programs?
Rudi Halbright: We’re trying to model it based on the customer specific behavior. That is hard enough to be able to do, but then we have a number of other complexities. We have the fact that we’re considering cost both on a distribution basis, as well as on generation of the energy. And the generation, we can predict a little bit more easily. Distribution, there’s a lot of levels to which you can take that and the complexity goes up very quickly as you get more and more local in your map.
So for now, we have a simplified version that we’re using to determine things based on a group of like-circuits that, based on our historical data and our forecasts, behave similarly. So we could say, “All of these circuits will behave similarly and be in group one. These ones will be in group two,” and then so we’ll have different prices that represent those groupings. And that’s a great start. It actually makes this a much more manageable problem to solve while we’re trying to pilot these rates before we fully implement some huge solution. But the question then is, to what degree are we lowering our cost and simplifying the effort? And are we still accurately capturing those circuits?
And we found out in one particular example, while this made sense, when we started with that circuit grouping, we had a new customer sign on that had a much higher amount of impact on the distribution system than any of the existing customers. And that meant that other customers in that grouping who weren’t on the same exact circuit saw a much less accurate modeling. And so that actually has an impact on what they’re able to earn, because now if we’re saying, “Well, the distribution system is maxed out, we don’t see much variance in the distribution rates because it’s always maxed out,” then there isn’t a chance to effectively buy low and sell high.
And beyond that, we have some limitations on how much we can consider in the sense of, in the ideal scenario, we would be able to address congestion on our distribution grid, all the way down to what impacts any group of customers on a given, let’s say on a block that are all in the same transformer. We’ve done a lot of transformers, and so the number of permutations we now have to consider in the rates is exponentially quite a bit larger, and more than we can do at this point. So we’re not able to optimize it to that level, so we’re doing it at the level that we can for now.
Brad Langley: It’s a great lens just into how complex and how many moving pieces there are to a project like this. What do you see as the biggest barriers or threats to success?
Rudi Halbright: One of the sort of more immediate concerns is that not only are we introducing people to a new wave using vehicles to provide energy and having them think differently about their vehicles, we’re also introducing this idea of hourly flexible pricing. A dynamic rate, which is new to most customers, is a little anxiety producing to many, doesn’t give you the same certainty that you may have had, and adds complexity to it. And the fact that we’re doing both of these at the same time means that we have to succeed at both for either to succeed, which does tend to keep me up at night a bit, because if it fails, we won’t necessarily know to what degree it fails because of the dynamic rate, or it fails because of the technology and people’s resistance to it.
Brad Langley: We call this show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry, and it’s also a famous Spider-Man quote, “With great power comes great responsibility.” So Rudi, what superpower do you bring to the energy transition?
Rudi Halbright: I think that what I bring together is a combination of passion, persistence, increasing amounts of patience, creativity, and a willingness to be optimistic even no matter what I’m concerned about. So I keep focused on the goals — what we’re trying to achieve — and committed that we’re going to go there.
Brad Langley: Multiple superpowers, I love it. All right. Well Rudi, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Rudi Halbright: Thanks, me too. Thanks for having me.
Brad Langley: Rudi Halbright is an Expert Product Manager of Vehicle Grid Integration at PG&E. With Great Power is produced by GridX, in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on the clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is the enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging race structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy, all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid.
Our production team includes Erin Hardick and Mary Katharine O’Connor. Anne Bailey is our Senior Editor. Stephen Lacey is our Executive Editor. Sean Marquand composed the original theme song and mixed the show. The GridX production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you and we really hope it is, we’d love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate or review us at Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with a friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life. As always, thanks for listening, I’m Brad Langley.
