EPAct Annual Reporting Webinar

This is a text version of the EPAct Annual Reporting Webinar video.

TED SEARS: Welcome, everyone. Greetings. We're glad that you've joined us for this informational webinar on the EPAct State and Alternative Fuel Provider Fleet Program. My name is Ted Sears, I'm with the National Renewable Energy Lab, NREL. The National Renewable Energy Lab supports the US Department of Energy's implementation of the EPAct Fleet Program.

And I have been involved with the program. I took a look at the registration list, so I recognized some of your names. Some of you may know I've been involved with the program for I think close to 15 or 16 years. And I'm glad to see that we have some new names joining us today as well as some old hands.

Our hope is that this webinar will serve as a little bit of a refresher for some of you who are-- for whom this program is old hat, but also can serve for new Points Of Contact or POCs as a means to help you get off to a good start as we are presently in the annual compliance reporting season.

But as a reminder, as you'll hear today, those reports are due at the end of this year, December 31 will actually be due to the holiday it'll be January 2, the holiday falling on the weekend. Those reports will be due at that time. However, we do always encourage folks to turn their reports in early. And toward that end, we're hoping to that this webinar will be helpful.

Before we begin, I do want to-- well, we have begun. But I'd like to make take a moment to just introduce the team on hand here on our end. For those of you who've been involved with the program, I think that one of the things that we pride ourselves on is 100% compliance. So as compliance programs know, some of you may be familiar with EPA programs or things like that where there are various levels of compliance.

And we have been in 100% compliance for well over 15 years. And the reason that we're able to do that is because we have a tremendous team effort. We do a lot of education compliance outreach. And we are here for you. So I just want to introduce people I think you'll be able to see the folks on video.

My colleagues at NREL include Darlene Steward who is my-- we're linked at the elbow and we've been involved with the program together for many years. And she is responsible for a lot of the back end and administrative end of things to make sure that things run smoothly. So Darlene is here. And we're also joined by Erin Andrews-Sharer. Erin is a new member to the team, and she is part of our group that helps get back to you when you have questions. And so it's great to have Erin join us.

You also may be familiar with the name Deb Gross. So Deb is with CACI. She's one of our two subcontractors. And she's been with the program-- I think Deb dare I say longer than I have you've been involved, I know. And so Deb is your great go-to contact when you have questions about actual reporting or issues with the database access, things like that. She also helps new POCs folks get started.

And then we're also joined by two colleagues at a subcontractor of ours, ICF. So Nicole Rodi and Sofia Napolitano. Together we all provide the response when you make a phone call to our technical response line or our hotline, or you submit an email, that goes directly to Nicole and Sofia.

And then we as a team will provide answers to you. So we are here for you. And you'll see as we go through our presentation today we try to do a little bit of a tag team. So I think not all of us but most of us will have an opportunity to speak. We want you to recognize, see our faces, understand that we're here for you. And yeah, so that's why we decided to take this sort of tag team approach.

I'll begin with just a little bit of background about the program. So it is a fleet compliance program created by the Energy Policy Act of 1992. It's been amended a few times. The Energy Conservation Recovery Act or Reauthorization Act of 1998 added a few provisions. The EPAct 2005 provided some additional amendments, and then the Energy Independence and Security Act EISA or EISA 2007 also provided some amendments to the program.

And in each instance, those amendments have provided additional flexibility to the program which Nicole and team will go into with a little further depth. But as a general overview, if you are a covered fleet, that's certain state and alternative fuel provider fleets or alternative fuel providers are generally considered. Think of them as utilities. If you're on this webinar, you're probably part of a covered fleet so there's no need to go into what it takes to become a covered fleet.

But certain fleets we call them covered fleets must meet certain requirements. And those requirements are generally are primarily focused on the acquisition of light duty alternative fuel vehicles. And they also to some extent focus on petroleum reduction. There are a few goals that EPAct was focused on. And the one that is primarily at hand for us is related to reducing US petroleum consumption and reliance on external providers of petroleum.

There are effectively two compliance options that fleets participate at the covered fleets opt-- or not opt into, that all fleets when they enter the program enter via standard compliance. And under standard compliance, the focus as you'll hear is on alternative fuel vehicle acquisitions. And a requirement that's based on how many vehicles you require.

Fleets do have the opportunity to opt into what we refer to as alternative compliance. And the focus under alternative compliance if you're complying via AC, Alternative Compliance, is on petroleum reduction. So you'll hear about both of those today as we review both the requirements, how to comply, and then actually we will have a wonderful online walkthrough of the annual reporting process that Darlene will take us through.

In terms of the breadth of the program, there are-- so you're aware that you're not alone out there. There are over 300-- close to 310 fleets that report annually and those annual reports provide information on over 2,000 fleets. So there are a good number of fleets that are covered under the program and that file reports. And with that, I guess the next slide I'm going to hand it over to Nicole, I think who will begin walking us through standard compliance.

NICOLE RODI: Yes.

TED SEARS: Thanks, Nicole.

NICOLE RODI: So as Ted noted, there are two compliance options. I'm going to walk through standard compliance, and then pass it off to Erin to walk through alternative compliance. As he also mentioned, standard compliance fleet's focus on the acquisition of alternative fuel vehicles. There was a list of alternative fuels on the previous slide, and that is also included in the standard compliance document.

A lot of what I run through today is going to be in the standard compliance document which we will provide a link for. So through standard compliance, fleets are required to acquire a certain percentage of their light duty vehicle acquisitions as alternative fuel vehicles. For state fleets, that's 75%, and for alternative fuel provider fleets, that's 90%.

To determine the number of your required alternative fuel vehicle acquisitions, it's a pretty simple calculation which we'll walk through on the next slide. But this will result in your fleets required alternate fuel acquisition for that model year. Your fleet can earn credit by not only acquiring alternative fuel vehicles, but also acquiring excluded alternative fuel vehicles converting vehicles to alternative fuel vehicles, acquiring medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, acquiring creditable non-alternative fuel vehicles.

So in this case, it's mainly hybrid electric vehicles. They receive half a credit under the program. Investing in alternative fuel infrastructure, alternative fuel non-road equipment or emerging technology, and purchasing biodiesel for use in medium and heavy-duty vehicles. I will note that for a lot of these options there are some caveats to them.

And we do have compliance documents that you can review online just to make sure that you're meeting that compliance and reporting properly. So those will also be linked at the end of the presentation. I think Sofia is also adding the links as we go here. So those are some options for acquiring alternative fuel credits. So where to start. So we can move into the next slide.

So as I mentioned, you will start with determining your fleet's alternative fuel acquisition requirement. Here on the screen is just a really simple calculation. Note that you do remove excluded vehicle acquisitions from your fleet's overall light duty vehicle count prior to then multiplying it by your given percentage for that model year.

We do have a table of excluded vehicles available in the standard compliance document. But those typically included in that list for example are take-home vehicles, emergency vehicles, law enforcement vehicles, those types of vehicles. But like I said, there is a list in the standard compliance document.

Then you'll want to review your fleets vehicle acquisition and credit earning activities. That includes the list of all the things that I just mentioned before. Infrastructure installations, biodiesel use for medium and heavy-duty vehicles, acquiring hybrid electric vehicles, and we do recommend that you track these acquisitions and credit earning activities throughout the year. And you kind of start planning ahead so that you can track them throughout the year and understand what your requirement is.

That said, if your fleet does have difficulty meeting your compliance, there are some options which we'll talk about on the next slide. So those options include first we recommend applying your banked credits. Banked credits basically are credits that you've earned from previous years that roll over.

Again, there are some caveats to some of the ways that you can acquire credits and whether or not those credits roll over. But many fleets will have credits from previous years that they were able to bank and then are able to use to meet their vehicle acquisition requirements for that year. So you can do that, and Darlene's going to walk you through how you can actually apply those credits in the reporting tool, and where you can see those credits that you have.

You can also acquire credits from other fleets through trading credits with other covered fleets. The program's website lists-- has a list of fleets that have excess credits that are willing to trade. And along with contact information, and it's a pretty simple process that requires a document called the proof of credit transfer.

So that form is on there, so we do recommend reaching out to another fleet if you need to trade credits. And then as a last resort you can apply for exemptions. We do have exemption guidance online that I recommend walking through if you're considering this option because there are a lot of specifics to it.

But just one general note is you must submit your annual report prior to applying for an exemption. And exemption requests are due by January 31. And like I said, there's additional guidance online, and you can actually submit your exemption request online. So that is an option if needed.

And then we always say it, reach out to the regulatory information line if you need help with any of this. If you need guidance documents, if you have a question about how to apply credits. And yeah, Sofia just added it to the chat there. We have an email and a phone. So please reach out if you need help.

So that's a general overview of standard compliance. I'm going to pass it over to Erin for alternative compliance. And as we said, Darlene will be running through the standard compliance reporting tool, and you'll get a lot more information about how to actually report on your credits for standard compliance.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: Great. Thanks, Nicole. So we'll be brief on alternative compliance because there is a lot involved here, and we know that actually the majority of fleets use standard compliance. There's only about 10 fleets who comply with the program using alternative compliance. But we want to make sure that you know it's here and available as an option.

And for folks who use alternative compliance, hopefully it's a good refresher. So alternative compliance may be a good option for fleets that have a significant number of medium or heavy-duty vehicles that are capable of using biodiesel in excess of the 50% cap that's associated with standard compliance, or if they're capable of using other alternative fuels.

Also it's good for fleets who might wish to combine hybrid electric vehicles and alternative fuel use, and/or are subject to state or local requirements or policies that call for petroleum reduction or reductions in carbon footprint or greenhouse gas emissions. And this is because the alternative compliance program requires that fleets create a petroleum reduction plan, and really focuses on those petroleum reduction strategies.

So these strategies include the use of alternative fuel, and new or existing alternative fuel vehicles, the use of biodiesel, reducing vehicle miles traveled which reduces petroleum by driving fewer miles, replacing non-alternative fuel vehicles with more fuel efficient non-AFC models so they might have better fuel economy. These are just newer vehicles that use less petroleum. Reducing idling via truck stop electrification, idle time reduction plans, or onboard idle reduction technology.

So all of these are methods that folks can use to achieve alternative compliance. And essentially, there's a plan that you submit on the front end, and then a report on the back end that tracks these various strategies to reach a certain goal of reduced petroleum. So if you have additional questions about alternative compliance, please follow up after the webinar. We're happy to discuss in more detail and provide more information. But for now, that's a brief overview of this compliance method.

So then I briefly want to talk about annual reporting. And just give a high-level overview of what this looks like. So hopefully as most of you are aware, we're in the annual reporting phase for model year 2023. Annual reports are due no later than December 31. And as Ted mentioned, because of it landing on a weekend and a federal holiday, that's actually January 2 for this year.

But you can submit your fleet's annual report as early as September 1. So that window of reporting is open and we encourage folks to jump into the online tool that Darlene will show you and start working through your reporting. So this is for both standard compliance and alternative compliance. It opens September 1 every year. There's a four month reporting season. And you can jump in for that model year as early as you want.

So looking at the timeline here on the right, I'll just give you a brief overview of the bigger picture here. So right now we're in model year 2024, and you can go into that online reporting tool for model year 2024 and kind of work through how you're going to plan to report. But it's open for 2023 for submission.

And you can submit as we said between now and the end of the year. But then thinking about so where we are right now in November, the rest of this kind of next year and then going into 2024, things that you should be aware of. The intent to apply for a waiver for alternative compliance begins early in the year. So that's in March you need to submit that intent.

And then if you're really interested in going the alternative compliance method, you would submit your waiver application by the end of July. So again, more details there. But just to know that those calendar events are kind of coming up. And then as we end model year 2024, the reporting will open up again for model year 2024, September 1 and run through the end of the year for both standard compliance and alternative compliance.

And then as Nicole mentioned, if you're interested in submitting an exemption-- filing an exemption that has to happen after you have submitted your annual report, but can happen as early as September 1 through the end of January of the following year. So in this case, as we're thinking about model year 2024, that would be January 31 of 2025.

So we know the years are kind of-- it all kind of shifts and you're thinking about the previous year for your model year reporting, and that can get a little bit confusing. So that's why we have this timeline available for you. And again, you can always touch base with folks if you have additional questions.

So finally, just to review for standard compliance annual reporting, fleets can submit annual reports like in two different ways. So the report online which will walk you through is really the primary way for folks to submit for standard compliance. The guide can be found at this link that we've provided for you.

And again, we'll provide more information here shortly on that. You can also report via spreadsheet and email that completed spreadsheet to the email listed here. You can also download that spreadsheet on the website. Again, it's really up to you. We emphasize using the online reporting tool because we've tried to make this as easy as possible for you. But know that there are these two options here available. And with that, we'll turn it over to Darlene.

DARLENE STEWARD: All right, Thank you, Erin. I am going to be walking you through the standard compliance reporting tool. And these two screenshots here are just kind of a little bit of a quick introduction that you can look at while I'm figuring out how to share my screen. OK, so this is the annual reporting tool. This is the login screen.

And I do want to just point out really quickly here if you are a new POC and you're taking over a fleet from a previous person, what you want to do is request new fleet access. That's this little button here. Please do not just use the other person's login credentials. It helps us to keep track of who's doing what with these fleets if we have current information about the person who is actually responsible for filling out the reports.

We also communicate with fleets via email throughout the year. And we need to keep contact information current. So that is another reason to make sure that if you are taking over a fleet from someone, go ahead and create your own login and then Deb Gross will contact you and hook you up with your fleet so that everything work smoothly for your fleet.

So I'm just going to log in right now. So this is the first screen that you see when you log in to the web tool. And this screen has a couple of different sections to it. The fleet management one is the one that we're going to be working with mostly today. But there's also a screen or contact information and so forth that you can update. And you can change your password, for example, things like that.

So do try to keep your contact information up to date. Again, as I said, we do try to communicate with fleets throughout the year, and so we want to make sure that we can get in touch with you. So kind of going back to the fleet management screen, this has a dropdown list of the different fleets that I am responsible for. We're going to be working with our Power On Inc fleet this time.

So Power On Inc is an alternative fuel provider fleet. So there's-- so this would be a fleet that is required to acquire 90% of their light duty vehicles should be alternative fuel vehicles. So we have some additional information here, but we're going to focus on annual reporting. So for this particular fleet we are using standard compliance.

So as Erin mentioned a few minutes ago, you can fill out information for your model year 2024 report right now. As you go through the year, you may want to add the vehicles as you acquire them. That is a helpful way to keep track of things. But we are now in the reporting year for model year 2023. So it's the 2023 report. That is what we want to submit in December this year.

So I've already started this report, but I'm going to go ahead and click on that. So the very first step, of course, is to enter the number of light duty vehicles that I have in-- that I have acquired during the model year. So I want to point out a couple of things here Erin mentioned excluded vehicles.

And you can see occasionally in places in the tool there'll be like a little highlighted section and a question mark. This gives just a little bit of additional information in this case about what types of vehicles are excluded vehicles. So you can see that kind of throughout the tool. There'll be these little kind of information-- additional information question mark highlighted things.

There's also one for light duty vehicles sort of defining what those are. Again, all this information is in the guidance documents for the program as well and obviously in much more detail. And as always, you can contact the program if you have questions. So I had 23 vehicles, so I'm going to go ahead and save that.

And this has calculated that I need to acquire 21 light duty AFVs. So that's my requirement. So I can either go to the next step by clicking on this next step button, or I can come up here and click on the vehicles button. So this is as we kind of discussed earlier, the real focus of the program is to acquire light duty alternative fuel vehicles. So this is kind of the first stop on our reporting. And again, more of these kind of information access things.

And then we have some options here. So I've already added a few vehicles here. And you can see some basic information about these vehicles. You can also sort this output or this table here to perhaps if you have an internal ID number or an ID number that you want to on you can sort on the vehicle type and so forth. So that might be a way for you to keep track and organize.

So the other thing that I want to point out here is the number of credits that the vehicle would obtain. And so that's a kind of a good way to keep track of how many credits you've acquired so far. So you will note up here that I've acquired four alternative fuel vehicles, these four vehicles. But so far I've only gotten three credits for them.

So why is that? That's because one of these vehicles is a medium or heavy-duty vehicle. That this one here, the ford transit van is a medium heavy-duty vehicle. And while it would earn one credit, we are not able to get credit for it yet because we have not yet met our reporting requirements.

So once we've achieved the light duty vehicle acquisition requirement for the year, then we can get credit for medium and heavy duty alternative fuel vehicles. So there's a couple of ways to add new vehicles. Obviously, if you're just starting a brand new report, you would click on this button here to add a vehicle.

There's quite a few dropdown lists sort of things that presumably will help you kind of fill in the right information, again, for the make and model we have a dropdown list of the commonly available vehicles. You can also select other and just fill in this information for here, and then and so on as you go through this form. This is pretty straightforward. The values here that have an asterisk next to them those are required fields. So most as you can see most of these are required.

There's a couple like your zip code, and you can add some internal information like if you have an internal tracking number, or something you can add that here. And that's obviously not required. But the ones with the kind of orange asterisks are required field. So the VIN number, usually people kind of cut and paste this from-- we'll see if we can get it to stop here.

So the VIN number has to be unique. So you may find that if you, for instance, make a mistake and had already entered the vehicle, it will not accept that at all. It won't save that record for you because the VIN number has been repeated. So that's also helpful to make sure that you're not double counting vehicles or perhaps entering a vehicle that you entered the previous year or something like that.

So the acquisition date, again, these vehicles would have been acquired during the model year 2023. So the first date here is August, that's the most recent date that's actually in 2023. So for vehicles in this program for the model 2023 reporting year, you need to have acquired the vehicle in and put it in service in 2023 in model year 2023.

So I'm just going to select the weight class here. So this is a light duty vehicle. There's also kind of a basic kind of category. This is an automobile. And then this vehicle type has a lot of choices here. And some of these are a little cryptic. So we put together this decision tree to help you work through which vehicle to select. And I suspect that you are not seeing this.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: We can see it, Darlene.

DARLENE STEWARD: You can see it? OK, great, sorry. [LAUGHS] OK, so to get started, the first question is, can the vehicle be plugged in for this particular one? Yes, this can be plugged in. The question here is, does the vehicle have an internal combustion engine in addition to the electric motor? Yes, it does.

And then the question, the next question is, can the engine operate on liquid or gaseous alternative fuel? Well, no. This is a gasoline vehicle. So no. And then the final question here is, is the electric drive vehicle either a light duty vehicle that meets the NHTSA minimum driving range criteria for a dual fuel electric automobile or is it a medium or heavy-duty plug-in electric vehicle? Well, in this case, this is a light duty vehicle as you recall. But it does meet those requirements, so yes.

OK, so we need to select DPHEV. So we're going to go back to our previous screen. Oh, [LAUGHS] I have stuff in the way here. There we go. OK, so we enter DPHEV. And then you'll notice that the fuel type and the engine configuration have been already sort of selected for you. That's because this particular vehicle type is only the alternative fuels only electricity and it's only a dual fuel configuration. So this vehicle was not converted, and I'm not going to enter an internal ID right now. So we've save that vehicle.

So now you can see I've added another light duty vehicle. And you can see that I now am getting credit for my medium and heavy-duty vehicle as well because I did meet the requirement. So I did not-- as you recall, I needed to get 21 light duty vehicles so I obviously didn't meet the requirement by acquiring light duty vehicles. How did I meet it? OK, so I also had some biodiesel and I also had some investments in alternative fueling infrastructure and non-road equipment.

So going on to biodiesel, the one thing that I want to emphasize for biodiesel is that the only portion of the fuel that is neat 100% biodiesel is applicable to be reported for this particular section of the reporting tool. So that can be a little bit tricky to figure out especially if you have some kind of odd numbers. So we have a biodiesel calculator. The number that you would enter here in the gallons is the number of gallons of the mixture.

So I have-- say I have B20 and I bought 122,000 gallons of B20, and so this little calculator will give me a calculation of the number that we should actually enter in the report. And just click the calculator here, so 24,400 gallons of B100. And this is what we want to actually add to the report. We have a little button down here at the bottom says import total. So that gives us the total here.

And we just want to refresh this screen. OK, so for some reason that didn't click over here. OK, so now we've saved the biodiesel that we purchased. As Erin mentioned earlier, there are some limits on the amount of biodiesel that you can get credit for. And that would be half of the total acquisition requirement.

So in this case, it's like whatever 10 and 1/2 credits for 10 credits is the maximum. So as you can see, we've gotten 10 credits for biodiesel so we've sort of maxed that out. So the next step is to look at our investments. So there are sort of three categories where you can get credit for investments.

The first is alternative fuel infrastructure, and then non-road equipment, and then emerging technology vehicles. So for infrastructure, this would be alternative fueling infrastructure. And that includes things like EVSE or for charging electric vehicles, or putting in a biodiesel station, or something along those lines.

So for EVSE, only level 2 charging and above is considered alternative fueling infrastructure. So if you just have a 220 plug or something like that, that's not considered alternative fueling infrastructure. There are some rules about what you can get credit for and what you can't get credit for.

And again, the guidance documents really kind of go into this in depth. There are, again, some of these information access points here too to help with deciding various details about these investments. But basically, for infrastructure the infrastructure is either publicly available or privately available. You can get credit for both of those. So if you, for example, have a private biodiesel station that you're using to fuel your medium heavy duty vehicles, you can get some credit for that. You get more credit for a public station that's accessible to other people.

And then you also do not have to-- you can, for example, a utility that gives a credit to one of their customers for putting in a public biodiesel station, they can get credit for that. You can get credit for that as well. You cannot get credit for a customer putting in a private infrastructure station. So again, as I said, there's some rules here we don't really have time to go into all of that here. But the guidance documents give a much, much more information about that as well as you can always contact the program.

But basically, what you want to do here is enter the information about whether what type of station it is, what type of fuel, and whether it has public access is an important point. The in-service date is just the date when you actually started using the infrastructure. So for some of these stations, you obviously might have the construction period go over a year.

So you might have investments in one year and then you actually put the station in service the next year. In that case, you would enter the entire amount that you invested in the year that you put the infrastructure in service. So you would have-- so in this case, for example, we may have-- this may have taken more than a year or two to build this biodiesel station, but we put it in service in early model year 2023.

So we would enter the investment amount. And then want to just point out that you do have to certify that none of the funds that you use to purchase this equipment were provided by a grant or something along those lines. So if you did receive partial funding through a grant or something like that, you would subtract that amount from this investment amount that you can get credit for.

So and then add some information about the particular-- some contact information for the person who you purchased it from. And you can-- and then you can-- there's a couple things you can do here. You can download the infrastructure data that you entered, and you can even copy this if you put in two stations and say the only difference is a different location, for example. You can put that information in there by just copying it.

Kind of the same for non-road equipment. I won't spend too much time talking about this, but for this particular one we had an electric forklift that we purchased, and I'm going to go ahead and copy that because we had a couple of these forklifts. All the information is really the same except for we spend a little bit less on this new one.

And again, I need to certify that that is an investment that we did not get any brands for. OK, so now we have a couple of these investments for the infrastructure and for non-road equipment. There's kind of a running tally here at the top that tells us how much money in total that we've spent, and how many credits we've obtained for this.

So you'll notice that for the infrastructure we spent $112,000. We got four credits for the non-road equipment, we got five credits, and then there was this $12,000 that was sort of left over after calculating the number of credits your investments give you for each $25,000 of investment you get one credit with some limits. For example, for infrastructure and non-road equipment there's a maximum number of credits that you can get. But basically for each $25,000 you get a credit.

So we've got nine credits, but we had $12,000 left over. Not quite enough for another credit. So there's no credit there. Sometimes you also may not get credit for these aggregated amounts that are the leftover amounts from both the infrastructure, non-road equipment, and emerging technologies.

If you've already met-- you've already exceeded the limit of the total number of credits that you can get for any of these categories, then you can't get any additional credit through these aggregated investments. But in any case, this keeps track of all that for you. So you get the maximum number of credits for the investment that you make.

So I'm going to go ahead and go on now to the reporting section. We've kind of-- again, we've kind of got a running tally across here of how many credits that we've obtained for these various strategies. And then we go to the reporting screen and this gives us kind of a summary of everything that we've done so far.

So we have 21 AFV credits that's our requirement based on the fact that we had 23 light duty vehicles. And then the credits that we obtained towards meeting that requirement or we have four credits from light duty vehicles, we have 10 credits from biodiesel, and then we have nine credits from investment, and then we have one credit from our medium and heavy-duty vehicle down here at the bottom. So this gives us a little summary of all the credits that we've obtained for our report.

And then this is the summary, the final tally balance. We had before we started this report we had 10 banked credits or credits that we had obtained from executing our requirement in previous years. So we can-- if you are able to purchase more alternative fuel vehicles or get credit for investments and so forth that actually exceed your requirement, then you can bank those credits. And in this case, we're able to bank through credits for this year and add those to the 10 credits that we had from previous years.

So once we submit our report, then our bank credit and that report is approved, then our bank credit balance will increase. And then we can use those bank credits in future years to meet our requirement if we should fall short in a future year. So this is just the credit activity reports. We have three credits that we're going to be able to bank. We don't need to apply bank credits. But in the case that we're short a little bit, we can apply some of those bank credits.

So it's always good in any given year to enter as many vehicles as you actually purchase. Don't just meet the requirement. If you bought infrastructure or bought non-road equipment, if equipment then definitely enter it because you can bank those credits for future years. So we do have excess credits and I'm willing to trade those with another fleet.

And also I need to certify that I used alternative fuel in my alternative fuel vehicles whenever it was available. So I can go ahead and do that. And then I can submit the report. So I'm going to not submit this one right now. But once the report is submitted, Deb reviews it and make sure that everything is OK, and then she approves the report and you'll get a notification, like an email notification that the report has been approved.

So what if you made a mistake? You didn't enter all of your vehicles, you accidentally submitted the report before you were really ready to? In that case, just contact the program-- contact Deb and she can reopen the report for you so you can add your additional vehicles, and so forth.

So once you finish the report and you've submitted it, let's say that if you did not have any bank credits and you were not able to-- had some vehicles that you didn't purchase because you didn't have any fuel available for those vehicles so you were a little bit short, if you do want to apply for an exemption for the vehicles that you did not-- were not able to purchase you need to fill out the report even if it's not-- you're not actually meeting the requirement. Fill out the report. Submit it. So the report has to be approved before you can submit an exemption request. So that's the only sort of caveat there with exemptions. So I'm just going to go really quickly--

TED SEARS: Real quick.

DARLENE STEWARD: Well, yeah. Actually--

TED SEARS: We're going to have--

DARLENE STEWARD: --why don't I sign off because we need to have some time for questions and I've taken too long? So I will leave it at that. Thanks, everyone.

TED SEARS: OK. Thanks. Can we go back to the slides? Thank you, Darlene. OK, so I'm going to in the interest of time and I know there's some good questions that were posted in the chat we just have a handful of minutes. I'm just going to point to these slides will be made available. So certainly you'll be able to follow up on these slides.

We also we received a whole slew of great questions in the chat. And I will attempt to answer a number of them relatively quickly, but we will also post those questions with the answers that hopefully will be helpful. And of course, many of these answers are available in our resources that are online. We have a number of guidance documents, there was a reference in this presentation to standard compliance and alternative compliance, guidance documents, there are in addition some shorter documents related to things like exemption, how do I deal with exemptions? How do I deal with biodiesel? Things of that nature.

And I will also refer people to the FAQs, the Frequently Asked Questions. And yeah, and then lastly, just want to note is we do as I said at the start we pride ourselves on outreach education compliance assistance. And simply put, we can improve what we offer you with some feedback from you. So we would encourage you to take a few minutes to complete the survey or otherwise at any point during the year get back to us.

Let us know what we're doing right. Let us know where we could improve things because that's our goal, to try to alleviate any burden on your end. And with that, I'm going to hand it to Joanna, and I think maybe we'll run through some questions. And of course, they're also just note there's the regulatory info email and phone number as well.