Vanessa Arjona, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office: My name is Vanessa Arjona and I’m the communications lead for our office. Today’s H2IQ Hour will introduce us to DOE’s new annual transportation technology baseline website. And you’ll get an exclusive peek into some of the key features and tools this new website will offer including interactive charts on fuel economy, vehicle cost, levelized cost of driving and emissions across various powertrain. As you’ll hear ATB is a really neat tool and it cuts across multiple technology offices highlighting collaboration across DOE’s offices including the vehicles, bioenergy and the hydrogen and fuel cell technologies office as well as the EERE’s strategic priorities and impact analysis office.
You’ll get an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback on the website at the end of the presentation. And if you are active on social media, we encourage you to share anything interesting, surprising or informative that you get from today’s H2IQ Hour by using #H2IQ in your post. And also stay tuned as we’ll be announcing next month’s topic soon. We’ll begin shortly but first I have a few housekeeping items to tell you about. So today’s webinar is being recorded and the recording along with the slides will be posted to our EERE hydrogen fuel cell technologies office website. So please be sure to check back to the site if you’d like to download a copy of the slides or watch the webinar recording.
All attendees will be on mute throughout the webinar so please submit your questions via the Q&A box that you should see at the bottom on the right-hand side of your WebEx panel and we will cover those questions during the Q&A at the end of the presentation. And so with that I would like to introduce my colleague and H2IQ Hour host for today Neha Rustagi. Neha manages our hydrogen delivery and technology analysis project portfolio in our office. Neha it’s great to have you with us today and please take it away. Neha, you might be on mute.
Neha Rustagi, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office: Thank you Vanessa. Sorry about that. So it’s my honor to introduce the first ever transportation annual technology baseline website being released by DOE. In the past the ATB has existed for the power generation sector and has been a really valuable resource to share cost and performance data. I want to acknowledge my colleague, Kara Podkaminer from the strategic priorities and impact analysis team at DOE, also known as SPIA. And also my colleagues at the DOE’s vehicle technologies office and bioenergy technologies office all within the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy.
And with that I’m going to turn it over to the two lead PIs for this effort from the National Renewable Energy Lab, Laura Vimmerstedt and Paige Jadun. They will be outlining how the ATB functions, the resource. And please keep in mind we really want to solicit feedback from you all on this resource to get more information about how it could be improved and how it might be useful to you and anything else you’d like to see in it. So as you’re watching this presentation if you can take notes to relay to us on anything, any feedback on this website we would very much appreciate it. So with that, Laura you can take it away.
Laura Vimmerstedt, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Thanks so much Neha. And welcome everyone to the webinar. I just want to underline what Neha just said about feedback and also what Vanessa said about questions. So there’s four avenues for that. First of all as Vanessa mentioned you can submit questions for the dialogue box on this webinar. On the website that we’re launching today there’s also a form for questions. There’s also a user survey that asks for specific feedback about particular topics. And there’s user registration form that’s optional but that would enable us to reach out to you with specific questions about how we might improve.
So I think one of the most important things that we would like to establish today is a dialogue with all of you. And this format doesn’t lend itself to that directly but there are those four avenues for discussion and comments and questions and dialogue. So I encourage you to take advantage of those and also to pass this along to others who you think might be interested. So it’s my pleasure to acknowledge the team. We have a great team at both NREL and Argon National Laboratory. And the folks listed on the slides as authors as well as support staff have all contributed to bringing this to you today. So with that, if I could have the next slide Paige, please.
So the agenda today is to cover the motivation of the ATB and an overview of the project as well as the product itself and then to offer a time for questions and comments. So regarding the motivation of the ATB, we found that with the technologies of the energy efficiency and renewable energy office at DOE there has been rapid technological change that has made it difficult to find in one place current, credible and consistent information. And there’s a real need for this to inform transportation sector analysis. So as Neha mentioned we’ve done this on the electricity side of things. And this website that we’re launching today for the first time provides a similar product on the transportation side.
So the ATB is a website and a summary dataset of cost and performance estimates for selected vehicles and fuels. It’s also a portal that links you to other publicly available resources from across the sustainable transportation offices of DOE and the national labs that support that work. So we hope that it kind of pulls together all in one place a lot of the information that analysts can use. It does provide the set of scenarios of technological improvements. And it also provides interactive figures to explore data. It’s important to recognize what ATB is not. So it’s pulling together published data. It is not a primary analysis. It’s not a model and it is not a comprehensive set of future scenarios.
So essentially the ATB pulls together a high-level summary of real broad set of data across vehicles and fuel. Building from detailed component level and fuel pathway, feedstock and operating costs to higher level metrics such as costs, fuel economy and emissions. And then with selected assumptions such as discount rate, VMT and lifetime calculating a levelized cost of driving and a well to wheel emissions level, vehicle level emissions data. For the sources of this the primary ones are listed here. We also provide a spreadsheet that has line by line citations for data elements. And I want to emphasize that colleagues from Argon National Lab who developed many of these primary sources are on the line as well. So if you do have questions about those we may be able to answer them today with the support from Argon colleague or we can certainly take those offline as well. So we’re happy to provide detailed information about the sources of the ATB.
So the value of ATB we’re aiming to pull together a data set that is very useable, very transparent, consistent, credible and accessible that consolidates high level data from across the DOE’s sustainable transportation analyses. The DOE and national labs supporting DOE use for those analyses and also that we’re providing in a consolidated manner to other analysts outside of the DOE system for analysis that you may want to use. So we summarized the data at a high level for system wide analysis. And that’s to say that our emphasis is more so the full transportation sector and energy use within it as opposed to kind of very specific device level or component level analysis although it does build up from those details. And then we’ve also tried very hard to organize the data in a structured manner that will facilitate your use of it.
So all this data is free and publicly available and we hope easily accessible. So these are the objectives. Certainly we would welcome feedback if we’re falling short of this. So I can’t emphasize enough please do reach out to us and let us know if we’re falling short of these goals. So as Neha mentioned on the electricity side there’s a similar product. When you go to atb.nrel.gov you’ll see the electricity and transportation sides of the website. On the electricity side we just came out with the sixth update. And that data has been used for model input and analyses by a wide range of external users. So we’re very interested in making the transportation data set similarly useful to stakeholders in the transportation sector. And so again please do give us feedback on how it might be more useful to you.
So this is kind of the one slide overview of what all is in the ATB. And so we have core ATB data with base year and projected data for fuel economy, vehicle and fuel costs, emissions and then financing assumptions, levelized cost of driving and emissions of the vehicle level. This is conveyed in a set of products that includes a downloadable spreadsheet, the website itself, downloadable Tableau workbook, database friendly CSB formatted data files and then the slides from this presentation as well as the option to download figures in the Power Point form. And I think with that I’ll turn it over to Paige for the demo of the website. Thank you so much.
Paige Jadun, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Awesome. Thanks Laura. So yeah. I’m going to use the rest of our time today to really walk through the websites, highlight the technologies and the different types of data that are included and then as well as to just illustrate the overall website functionality. So I am showing the website now and this is the ATB home page so it’s just atb.nrel.gov. And as Laura has mentioned the NREL ATB includes two primary kind of categories of data. So the ATB electricity includes data on the electric generator technologies. And then today we’ll obviously be focusing on the other side which is the newly added transportation ATB. So I have it set up in tabs. I’m going to first jump to the technologies page. And this gives a good overview of the technologies that are included in the ATB and the different types of metrics and scenarios that we have here.
So the two main technology types in the ATB are our vehicles and fuels. If you scroll down this page it gives an overview of the kind of metrics that we provide. So as Laura mentioned for vehicles it’s fuel economy, vehicle cost, levelized costs of driving and then also per mile emissions. And then we also include these estimates for various different scenarios. So for the vehicle scenarios we include three different trajectories for vehicle technologies. And these are projected through 2050. So we have an advanced scenario and this assumes technology breakthroughs, increased investment as well as other conditions that could lead to improved costs of vehicle, improved performance or both of those things.
We also have a mid-trajectory. And we’ll show examples of these as we go along. But just to get you oriented this assumes technologies advance at moderate levels with continued industry growth. And then for reference we also have a constant trajectory. And this is essentially technologies are held constant through 2050 assuming no further advancements. And this is really a reference scenario. We in no way think that these technologies won’t advance further over time but it’s used as a good reference to compare other scenarios against.
For fuels we also have a different set of scenarios. So we include for fuels we include metrics like fuel cost and emissions. And these are estimated at various different scenarios of both technology progress and then as well as production volume. So for example we have current market scenarios which is really meant to provide an estimate of the observed kind of fuel prices in the market today. Then we also have current or other scenarios that are based on modeling. And these vary based on technology progress. So is it current or future technology as well as production volume? So current, low, high production volume.
One thing that I want to note to start is that while for vehicles we include trajectories so how these technologies advance over time. For fuels you’ll see that we provide single point estimates. So we don’t have trajectories for these but we have single point estimates depending on how we think, the state of technology and the state of production volume will look. And we’ll show examples of these as we move into technology pages. And as you’ll see in the ATB, we have a multitude of different fuel pathways for each of the different fuels. It can be a little overwhelming because there’s combinations of fuels, fuel pathways, scenarios. You’ll also see that we also have a down select of certain fuel pathways. So we kind of have a baseline fuel which can be kind of explained as kind of like the status quo fuel for today.
And then we also show examples where you can view the lowest cost fuel and the lowest CO2 emissions fuels for each powertrain. You can see the list of what is considered each of those pathways for the powertrains here but I’ll go into more detail as we get into the example. Lastly on this page is just an illustrated example of how to interpret some of our charts. And again I’ll go into detail when we actually get to this page. But just so you know, it’s here if you need a little help looking at these charts. Ok. So now we can actually dive into the data and what’s actually on the ATB. So I’m going to start with fuels. The ATB includes estimates for a variety of different on road fuels as well as jet fuel and marine. And I think hydrogen is of most interest to those on the call today. So I’m going to start there to illustrate kind of what the ATB fuels data looks like.
So I’m on the hydrogen fuels page now. And you can see here we include data for a variety of different pathways. And these are listed along the top of this table. So things like steam methane reforming, biomass gasification, low temperature electrolysis and so on. And then estimates were also provided for these different pathways but also for the different scenarios as I briefly touched on a moment ago. So for example if you see for steam methane reforming we have a current market scenario which is meant to reflect the current prices in the market today. We also have a current modeled current volume scenario and then as well as kind of a future models high volume scenario.
And as you move into more advanced scenarios you can see the impact on fuel price which decreases in these more advanced scenarios. So for hydrogen specifically the fuel price that’s shown here is reflecting the price at the pump. So this includes both production costs and then as well as delivery and dispensing. So the advances across scenarios here reflect both improvements to the production technology so steam methane reforming or low temperature electrolysis but also to improvements on kind of the delivery and the _____ technology as well.
So if you scroll down a little bit more you can see the metrics that are included here. So for example you have fuel price but we also have some other additional metrics, the production plant operating characteristics so such as the fixed capital investment, operating costs, feedstock costs and so on. And then as we scroll further down, we also include the emissions estimates for these different pathways. So both well to tank and well to wheels emissions. Before moving on I’ll say – so for this as we move on to some of the other charts that include vehicles it’s good to remember what our down select of fuel pathways is. So for the hydrogen or for the fuel cell hydrogen vehicles we kind of have the baseline fuel is set as the current model steam methane reforming pathway. And then the lowest cost is going to be kind of a future steam methane reforming pathway here.
So you can see that that cost decreased to $3.40 per GGE. And then the lowest CO2 emissions pathway as we move to those charts will be the low temperature electrolysis future models. So as you scroll down, you’ll see that this pathway, low temperature electrolysis has the lowest emissions. And then if you scroll down to the bottom of these pages – each of our technology pages so all of the fuels and all of the vehicles at bottom include documentation of the key assumptions and references that were used to go into these estimates. So we have detail on what were the sources used. Were there any calculations? Were there any important assumptions or processing that took place to go from the document it had published for us as to what we’re showing on the website. So it includes all of the key assumptions here. We won’t spend too much time. We also have opportunities to explore the definitions of any of the terms as well as a list of the relevant references for this page.
So that’s hydrogen. I’ll skip over to electricity just as another example for what a different fuel looks like. So as you can see electricity here, we have multiple different fuel pathways. And these primarily vary based on the grid mix that’s assumed. So is it a current or a future grid mix? Is it a certain region that has more or less renewable energy penetration which obviously impacts emissions? And it also varies based on the charging assumptions. So we have a PEV so that’s plug in electric vehicle charging. And it’s based on an assumed mix of residential as well as public charging. But we also have a scenario of DC fast charging.
So what happens if you do all of yours as a potentially more expensive DC fast charging public station? How does that impact the fuel price for that electricity? So you can see kind of for these different charging schemes and for these different grid mixes how the emissions and how the fuel prices change depending on these different scenarios. And then just similar to hydrogen we have all of the key assumptions for electricity that goes into these. So for example this table shows what the charging assumptions are and we also have all the similarly different references and different key assumptions that go into those electricity pathways.
You can also see on the left. So I showed hydrogen and electricity. You can also see on the left navigation over here the different other fuels that are included within the transportation ATB. So we have conventional fuels like gasoline and diesel. We also have a multitude of different biofuel pathways so different production processes for ethanol and as well as different pathways for renewable diesel and bio diesel so you can explore those here.
So now after giving a kind of an example of the fuel data that we have I’m going to jump over to now the vehicle side of the transportation ATB. So as Laura mentioned again before we have the key metrics for the vehicles that are included here are the fuel economy, vehicle cost, levelized cost of driving and emissions. For the current 2020 transportation ATB we are just focusing on light duty vehicles and specifically midsize passenger cars. So all of the charts you see here will be specifically for a representative midsize light duty vehicle. Similarly with fuels if you see on the left now you can see all of the different vehicle powertrains that we’re currently including in the ATB. So conventional vehicles like gasoline, diesel. We also have natural gas, hybrid, plug in electric vehicles for multiple ranges, battery electric vehicles for multiple ranges and then as well as fuel cell electric vehicles. And then we also have an opportunity to do comparisons for those which I’ll go into a little bit later.
So again for this audience I think fuel cell electric vehicles might be of most interest so I’m going to start there just for an example of what a vehicle page looks like. So for the current ATB just as a reference the fuel cell vehicle is modeled with the 320-mile range. So that’s the representative vehicle that we’re showing here. So on the vehicles page instead of the tables that we’re showing from fuels we now start getting into the interactive charts that Laura mentioned. So the first chart that we’re looking at here shows fuel economy for three different trajectory scenarios. And these charts are interactive in the sense that you can hover over them. You can see the specific values. You can also turn on and off different scenarios if you only want to see a subset.
So this chart again is showing fuel economy. You can see the blue is that constant scenario. Again it’s assuming no progress. We’re not saying that this is going to happen but it just provides a reference. What happens if there’s no additional progress for fuel cell electric vehicles as what you see today. And you can also see that or the mid and the advanced scenarios we start seeing improvements and increases in fuel economy. And these are primarily driven by advances in powertrain technologies and also things like light weighting that help to make these vehicles more efficient.
So if you scroll down the next chart shows vehicle cost. And so you can see a constant assumes no decreases but if you go into mid and advanced you see increasing levels of cost reduction. So for fuel cell vehicles the cost reductions are primarily driven by advancements in component costs such as fuel cells and as well as hydrogen storage. But it also reflects decreased power requirements do to that increased fuel economy that we saw in the chart above. So for example if you have increased fuel economy perhaps your fuel cell doesn’t have to be as powerful since now the vehicle is lighter and more efficient. And that helps to reduce costs as well.
So that’s vehicle costs. Moving into the levelized cost of driving and emissions. And I think this is where it starts to get a little bit more fun since now, we’re combining both the vehicle data and the fuel data. So this chart potentially is a lot to look at off the bat so I’ll kind of go through the intent and the functionality of this chart. So the top trajectory chart shows the projected levelized cost of driving for a fuel cell over time for different scenarios. Since I mentioned before the vehicle cost and the fuel economy are trajectories like we just saw above. However the fuel price and emissions are just single point estimates for different technology progress, different production volumes. But they’re just single point estimates fixed and held constant over time. Therefore the LCOD and the emissions trajectories that you see are just going to be reflecting the improvements of the vehicle technologies. However we do allow a user to explore the different ranges of fuel pathways that are available in an ATB.
So this bottom chart here shows the range of different fuel costs associated with the different hydrogen fuel pathways that are included on the website. So if you kind of hover over this, might be a little small to see. But you can see the selected fuel pathway that’s currently shown in the chart above. So that’s baseline fuel pathway and it’s the steam methane reforming current modeled cost. So you can also see the pathways that correspond to the maximum cost. So that’s a current market, steam methane reforming as well as the minimum cost stem methane reforming future modeled. So that ranges from $13.70 per GGE all the way down to $3.40 for the lowest cost pathway. So what’s really cool is you can understand this range. You can see where the current LCOD that’s showing now where that fuel cost falls in the range. But it will also allow a user to explore those different down select of pathways.
So with this filter on the right what happens if now you select the lowest cost pathway? So this gets updated and you can see the decrease in LCOD that happens. So as an example in the baseline the LCOD in 2050 for the advanced trajectory was I think 35 cents. So if we go back it’s 35 cents per mile. But now when we’re at the lowest cost pathway that reduces to 26 cents per mile. And you can see on the fuel cost that now the selected pathways for the black bar representing the current pathway is now at the bottom of that range. Similarly you can see the impact of going to a lowest CO2emission. And that’s more relevant when we get to this next chart.
So the next chart is similar but shows the CO2, similar to LCOD but shows the CO2, impact on CO2 emissions. So again I’ll start with the baseline. You can see how that trajectory changes over time. Since the baseline fuel pathway steam methane reforming which has higher emissions, you’re kind of at the upper end of that emissions range. But now if you select lowest CO2 emissions is moves to the bottom. You can see how those significant emission reductions based on changing to a different fuel pathway.
So again if you scroll down more like the other technology or excuse me, like the fuel pages we also have the key assumptions for the vehicle so you can see all of the different important factors that go into developing those estimates at the bottom of the page. And I’m going to skip going into other vehicles. They follow a similar format and you can explore each of them here for the different powertrains. So what I’m going to do next that I think is maybe one of the more interesting pages on the website and that’s the comparison.
So while you can explore one vehicle at a time for the different technology pages, you can also go to a comparison to then start to explore what those powertrains look like side by side. But before getting into the chart on the comparison page, we include some really important notes to consider before you start comparing different powertrains. And specifically many, many different factors go into a purchase decision for a vehicle. And they aren’t necessarily tied to the vehicle cost or the vehicle emissions. So it can be things like refueling time or the convenience of fueling. Things like the availability of different makes and models if they’re more – if you have more options available maybe you’re more likely to trend towards that powertrain. You can also think of things like introduction of new technologies like autonomous vehicles. All of these things might make the technology more or less favorable from a consumer perspective that aren’t directly apparent when just looking at an LCOD metric. So with those important considerations in mind we can start moving on to the charts.
So these follow a similar flow as the vehicle page but now you can start to see the vehicles right next to each other. So the first one is the fuel economy. So again we saw the specific fuel economy for fuel cells on the page. But now you can see how those for different powertrains how those technologies advance over time and how they compare. In an interactive fashion you can also kind of customize these charts a little bit. And if you only want to look at certain powertrains you can deselect or select the ones that you’re most interested in, the ones that you’d like to view. So moving on you can see a similar chart for vehicle cost.
So for example we see – we saw large decreases in the fuel cell electric vehicle. But if you then compare that to some of the other technologies you can see maybe more modest decreases or even increases in some of the more conventional and established technologies. So for example for the internal combustion engine vehicles, we can see that costs even kind of increase in the midterm or in the near term. And this is really a factor of increased penetration of advanced engine technologies which may come at a higher cost. So in order to achieve increased fuel economies you adopt more potentially ore expensive or more advanced engine technologies which can then lead to an increase in vehicle cost. These types of powertrain improvements or things like light weighting and cost increases are also seen in the alternative power train. However the cost decreases due to components like fuel cells and batteries outweigh some of those increases to achieve increased fuel economy.
So I think when it gets more fun as well is moving on now to the levelized cost of driving chart. You can see how the LCOD compares against the different power trains. And then as well you can see how the range of fuel costs, the different pathways corresponding to each of those powertrains and how that range varies as well. So this, the LCOD on the top is showing just the baseline fuel pathways. You can see kind of the relevant LCOD competitiveness of the different technologies given that baseline fuel. But you can also explore well, what happens if every powertrain had access to a lowest cost fuel. So you can see now with the baseline the fuel cell is somewhat higher LCOD than some of the other powertrains. But if we can imagine two different technologies where lower costs are achieved, you can see what impact that has on the levelized cost of driving. So now using a lowest cost pathway, things become a little bit more comparable and technologies all become a little bit more competitive going out into the future.
So if you scroll down you have a similar type functionality for the emissions chart. You can see how they compare, the well to wheel emissions compare on a per mile basis. And then you can also see how the fuel emissions compare on a per NMBTU basis. And then again this is showing lowest cost. You can see how this changes if now you choose the lowest CO2 emissions for each of the different powertrains. And again so we have the trajectory charts above. We also include a separate type of chart for the comparison page which is a single year comparison. So if you’re just interested in seeing maybe a specific snapshot in time. So this chart shows fuel economy for the different powertrains just for 2020 for the different scenarios.
So since all the scenarios start at the same place there’s not much spread going on. You can see the differences in 2020. But as you move to future years so for example if I select 2050 you can start to see what that scenario spread looks like over time, how advanced the advanced fuel economy scenarios might compare to each other in 2050. So this is just another option. The trajectories are interesting if you are just looking at a snapshot that you can be able to view these charts. One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is we do allow the opportunity to kind of show the data – if you select the hamburger chart, excuse me, hamburger icon you have the opportunity to show the data behind these, download the data as well as download the image as a PNG. And then again if you scroll to the bottom logo kind of fast. Again key assumptions for everything there, specific things to think about when you’re comparing different powertrains.
Ok. So that’s really the meat of the ATB is the technology pages. So we have the fuels technology, the vehicle technology comparisons. I want to end this demo by just mentioning a few other key pages that I think are important to note. So the first one that I’m looking at is the definitions page. So under the about section for transportation ATB you can see the definition. So we have definitions for all of the different vehicles. So what is the battery electric vehicle? What are some of the other important considerations that are going into those?
We have definitions for the different fuels as well as the scenarios which are also shown on the technologies page, the first one that I showed. And then as well as metrics. An important one here if you go to metrics you can see the definitions of fuel economy for example. But I think an important one here is the definition of the levelized cost of driving. So you can see what all we’re considering here. What are the assumption views on vehicle lifetime, on vehicle mileage? What is or isn’t included within that levelized cost of driving calculation. So I think this is a really important one if you’re interested in that metric. You can kind of see all these functions that go in there.
At the top we also have a literature context page. So this was kind of a recent literature review for recent sources and put some of these ATB trajectories in the context of recent literature. And then we also have a full list of references for every source that’s used within the website and to develop the data as well. Next page I want to jump to is the data page. So as Laura mentioned the ATB is a product that includes multiple different kind of fun products. So we have the website. We have the charts. We have this presentation. And we also have the data that’s available for download.
So we really tried to make this site easy to use and easy to access. But we understand it might not be how you want to view the data or it might not be all the data that you want to use. So these data downloads include all the data that you’re shown here and it also includes data for all the different fuel pathways. So when we looked at the levelized cost of driving charts we just had those three options for the baseline fuel, the lowest cost and lowest emissions. If you download the data you can get information about the levelized cost of driving based on all of those varieties and different pathways that we showed on the fuel page.
And then lastly on the data because we don’t include all of the different fuel pathways in the LCOD chart we also include an embedded Tableau workbook just as a quick stop to say oh well, I’m really interested in this pathway. I’d really like to see what the LCOD or emissions is for those. You can see it has kind of a similar format on the website. You can see the different powertrains. You can select different ones. And on the bottom, you can explore all of the different variety of fuel pathways that we have in the ATB. So you can add a row of those and see how it changes. This shows LCOD emissions. We have similar worksheets for the different metrics as well. So emission costs and etcetera. So this is another example of just another way to hopefully help you visualize the data if you don’t really want to download it and make your own chart.
Lastly as I think we’ve mentioned many times but I can’t stress enough we have a contact page on the ATB. So this is what Laura mentioned. So we are so willing and welcoming of any feedback for this website just on how to make it better and we would greatly appreciate anything that you have. So it can be on things like are there different technologies that you’d like to see. Are there different metrics that would be helpful, other sources that you think are useful that we should really review and include or just things like basic website structure? Like is something easy or hard to navigate? We’re really interested in any feedback that you have.
So that’s it for the demo. I’m going to jump back to the Power Point. So I really hope that demo was useful just giving you an overview of the scope and the functionality of the ATB. Just to close the vision for this product is we’re really striving to make something that is credible, that’s consistent, transparent, relevant and accessible. And we really want it to be useful to analysis that are looking at these current and future technologies. And just a good reliable resource for your work. And again, considering this was first release we’ll welcome any feedback data or metrics that would be useful for you.
Laura mentioned ways to communicate and engage and here are some specific links for that. So we have another, a little bit more detailed webinar on September 23rd that will go into detail on some of the other different technologies and you can register for that here. It will be a little bit longer. I think it’s two hours. And then we also have an email list. So if you want to receive email updates or announcements about the ATB then you can sign up here. And then lastly, I want to just give a huge, huge thank you to our DOE sponsors including Kara and Neha and the SPIA, HFTO, BTL and BHO offices. It really helped to make this product better and we really greatly appreciate their support. And with that, that’s all I have and Vanessa I’ll hand it back off to you.
Vanessa: Ok. Great. Thanks so much Laura and Paige for a very hands on and informative presentation. We are now going to move to the Q&A portion of the H2IQ Hour. And as a reminder please submit your questions through the Q&A box on the bottom right side of your WebEx panel. And with that I’d like to introduce Kara Podkaminer from the EERE strategic priorities and impact analysis team who will be running today’s H2IQ Hour Q&A session. Thank you for joining us today Kara and please take it away.
Kara Podkaminer, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: Thanks Vanessa and thanks Laura and Paige for that overview. That was really great. So we have a few questions that are coming in. Please continue to put them into the Q&A box. The first one that came in or a couple of them are regarding the inclusion of medium and heavy-duty vehicle data. And I’ll just quickly answer that to say that that is an area that we’re looking into and is being considered for future updates. But currently the focus of the current release is on medium, sorry, midsize passenger cars. The next question we had either Laura or Paige if you want to take this is how do we think about the data in the ATB relative to what EIA puts out?
Laura: Yeah. This is Laura and I’m happy to field that. Thanks. That’s a great question. So the EIA focuses on the whole energy sector in the United States of course. And I think they do a great job with regard to energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies. But that can only be kind of a small portion of their focus. So I would say that our work is much more grounded in the understanding that DOE, EERE office and the labs that support it have the direction of technology innovation, the timing and prospects for success with those technology innovations. And so hopefully we provide a little bit of a different perspective on how the R&D mission of the DOE and the lab might result in projected changes over time and a little bit more in real time.
So with an annual update frequency that we’re hoping to achieve with the annual technology baseline in the transportation sector that will be able to incorporate really cutting edge emerging technology innovation information in a way that EIA starts to do as well but may need to focus on other areas of the entire energy sector and perhaps update less frequently. And in addition of course the EIA is running a full energy sector model whereas ATB is just focused on the cost and performance data within the transportation sector with an emphasis on the technology, etcetera within scope for the EERE. So it’s a different mission and purpose. Hopefully that answers the question. If there are others along those lines please don’t hesitate.
Kara: Thanks Laura. So we have a few questions that ask about sort of the more detailed data and where these data sources or where the data is derived from so specifically talking about the fuel cell vehicle and what that data is based on and how we learn more details on that. So maybe Paige if you could take that.
Paige: Yeah. For sure. So we include – so all just as a one step back. All of the data that we include here should be based on previously published sources. So we’re really drawing on the literature that’s currently published and available. So I think the first place to check is under each powertrain and each fuel technology we do include kind of the key assumptions. We do include some kind of high-level interpretation of the detailed sources that can help understand the data that’s being shown. We also include on the data download line by line specific references for each estimate and if there were any kind of detailed calculations or detailed processing of the original source for that data. I think if there are further questions that aren’t answered on the website, I think it’s been – and you can always ask us for more information but then going to the original source. \
So for example for vehicles, grand majority of our data is based on our colleagues from Argon who used the autonomy modeling and the report that we’re drawing these estimates from includes a lot more detail on kind of the assumptions and the modeling methodology that goes in here. One specific thing I do want to call out which I think is pretty important for battery, electric and fuel cell vehicles are some of the component cost estimates. We do include these on the definitions page. So if you go to the definitions for battery electric vehicles and the definitions for fuel cell electric vehicles, we do include the underlying assumption for the battery cost trajectories as well as the fuel cell and the hydrogen storage cost. And then again if more detail is desired please reach out or check the original sources as well.
Kara: And sort of as a follow up to that there’s a question about is it possible to disaggregate the levelized cost of driving down to the cost components.
Paige: We don’t have that currently. In the data download if you download the combined you can see kind of all of the components that go into that. So for each LCOD estimate you can see what the levelized – or excuse me. What the associated fuel cost was and what the associated emissions were. And you can kind of do those calculations. We don’t have them separated out. But I think that’s a great suggestion to include in that data download to kind of list the different calculation pieces together. So again it’s not currently there. It should all be reproduceable given the equations that we’ve provided in that combined data download but it’s just not explicitly listed into separate columns but great suggestion.
Kara: Thanks. Neha maybe you can take this one. There’s a question about using hydrogen fuel cell vehicles for vertical takeoff and _____.
Neha: Thank you Kara. So as of now off-road transportation isn’t within the ATB platform but it’s being considered for future iterations. In general our office does have work ongoing on the feasibility of fuel cells as well as potential synthetic fuels in collaboration with our bioenergy office in aviation. So I think to get more information along the lines of what’s being asked if you can shoot me an email and I can chat you separately with _____ we can put you in touch with our lab PIs and our managers at DOE that are doing work on hydrogen for aviation.
Kara: Thanks Neha. I think that’s most of the questions that we have. If anyone has any last-minute questions, I know that this website is very new so we’re really looking forward to folks having a chance to go to the website and play around with it and really figure out what else we could add in and how it works, etcetera. Maybe I know that there was one question about just the website. So I don’t know if we could put that back up but it’s atb.nrel.gov.
Paige: Vanessa if you give me control, I can put the website back up. Is that what you mean?
Kara: Yes.
Vanessa: Absolutely.
Kara: So folks can see that. There’s also a question about how did you get to the page that had all of the underlying data tables. So maybe Paige while the website is up you can show that when you’re talking.
Paige: Start with that one. So the underlying data tables. I think this is what you mean. But there’s a data – if you go to transportation just the kind of transportation ATB header there’s a data selection under that menu. So if you click data it goes to the data page. And then you’re able to – if you click any of these it downloads the Excel file that kind of has an introduction in all of the line specific data. Please let me know if that’s not what you meant with this.
Laura: Well, and Paige if you scroll down that’s the interactive workbook that displays and where you can interact with all of the data.
Paige: Yes. Thank you. Yeah. So it’s under the data tab as well if you scroll under the data download you can see kind of all of that full set of pathway data here. And again I didn’t go to these but you can explore the different tabs on that tableau as well to see different metrics, not just the levelized cost interacting.
Laura: Kara while we’re on the page it looks like there was also a question about the electricity as a fuel and the sources of that. Paige, would you want to show that one?
Paige: Yeah. What is the question? I’m sorry. I can’t see them right now.
Laura: I think it was just to – I think this maybe flew by pretty quickly in the presentation. So just to see what the sources of electricity were.
Paige: Oh I’m sorry. Thank you. Yeah. So for electricity I can start the major sources are EIA at least for the current grid mixes. So we use EIA to get the current residential and commercial electricity prices. And then we also use EIA to get what the current grid mixes are to calculate the emissions. And so using those prices from EIA we have some assumptions as you can kind of see here to combine all of those different rates to get a kind of summarized electricity price. So for example we assume a certain percentage of residential or excuse me, a certain percentage of charging at the residential rate, a certain percent of charging at the residential rate but then for consumers who have access to time of use lower cost electricity and then a certain ratio of commercial and DC fast charging. And you can see the electricity prices from EIA here. And we combine those to get a kind of reference type electricity price. For the future scenarios we pull from both EIA to get projected electricity prices and as well as rely on NREL standard scenarios to get alternatives on kind of different future grid mixes and what the corresponding electricity prices are. Please let me know if you’d like further detail or clarification there.
Laura: And there was another question that kind of gets to the challenging issue of the manufacture suggested retail price in contrast to the vehicle prices that we show here. And Paige and Neha you might want to chime in on this one. But as we were developing this chart, we had a lot of discussion about what should really be shown. The challenge that we have in the manufactured suggested retail price is that there can be a lot of incentives offered or other considerations that might affect those prices. And so what is shown here is not the MSRP. So I don’t know Paige and Neha would you want to kind of chime in on that ‘cause that’s a significant issue and important to understanding this data.
Neha: Sure.
Paige: No. That’s exactly – oh go ahead Neha.
Neha: Just so like you were saying Laura. So the intent here was to convey the cost to the consumer of standardized vehicle that has the powertrain shown on the screen. So for instance a standard 320-mile fuel cell vehicle and then _____. And certain key aspects of each technology like the chassis, the power. We’re tech consistent across each powertrain so that it’s apples to apples so that we’re not comparing like one fuel cell vehicle with another model that may have different prices because of things that have nothing to do with the battery or the fuel cell. Because different models will differ in terms of like level of luxury and like level of features that a consumer might want. But that could easily be built into to any car. So basically the easiest way of showing MSRP was in part because this was meant to convey the impact of R&D progress and the cost of technology and also to facilitate more standardized comparisons across each of these spaces.
Paige: Yeah. And I’ll add too. That’s exactly right. And I think we got comments too like well, how does this compare to the Toyota _____. Why are the prices different or how does it compare to a Tesla? But I think it’s really important to note they might both be midsize vehicles. Kind of all of the underlying components and weights and all of the other technology kind of component attributes of that vehicle might not be consistent. So it’s really hard to do an apples to apples comparison of the MSRP with kind of the models cost that we have here.
Laura: And I should just note that a lot of the really detailed work on standardizing all of this occurred at Argon National Lan and using the autonomy tool. So thanks to our colleagues at Argon.
Kara: All right. Are there any other questions out there? If not, I’ll turn it back over to Neha.
Neha: Thanks Kara. So we do have a few more minutes and if anybody even has like just feedback you can type it into the chat box now or you can email us separately. We really want to know what you think of the website, positive or negative, if you think it’s useful, if you think it’s not useful, if there’s things you’d like to see, any input that you have either if you can send it to us through the chat box in the next few minutes or if you can email us separately we’d really appreciate it. We’ll use all of that to kind of decide next direction and improve this effort or launch new DOE efforts in the area of analysis. We would really appreciate your feedback. And the website since it’s now live you can on your own time go through it and see and let us know if you have any suggestions for how to make it more useful. So I see no other questions.
I can wait a couple more seconds just in case anybody has anything else. But otherwise there’s contact info on the webinar link and then also on the ATB website itself. Please do feel free. Thank you all for paying attention and for all of your time here and for all of your input. We’re really excited to be launching this website for the first time ever. Like I said it’s been done in the power generation space but this is the first time we’ve launched something like this in transportation. So a huge thanks to SPIA, VTO and BETO for all of their support with this and for leading this. And with that I’ll turn it over to Vanessa for any closing comments.
Vanessa: Great. Thank you, Neha and thanks, everybody for submitting your questions. Again for any additional questions or feedback feel free to reach out to the NREL team using that contact tab on the ATB website they provided. Finally I would just like to thank everyone for joining in today and remind you that the webinar and the slides will be available online in a few days at hydrogenandfuelcells.energy.gov. The website is shown here on my next slide here. And if you’re interested in learning more about upcoming H2IQ Hour topics I encourage you to sign up for hydrogen fuel cell alerts and news using the link shown on this slide. With that I’ll wish everybody a great rest of your week and goodbye.
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