EPAct Annual Reporting Webinar

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

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: All right. Thanks, Joanna. So my name is Erin Andrews-Sharer. And I am the NREL lead for the State and Alternative Fuel Provider Fleet Program. So if you would graciously give us your name and where you're calling in from, the entity represent, go ahead and put that information in the chat. We would love to just know who is in the virtual room with us today.

So we know that reporting comes once a year. And your fleet may have turnover, or you may not remember the process from last year. And so we want to make sure that you are set up for success going into the reporting season. So with that, we'll start with a very brief overview of the program and then reserve the majority of our time for a live walk through of the standard compliance online reporting tool.

So please feel free to add questions in the chat while we're going along. And our team members will address questions as they're able to in the chat. Any remaining questions, we will address at the end of the walk through. And we'll have a portion reserved for live Q&A. So feel free to hold your questions if you'd like to just get the answer from us live at the end.

So with that, I'll ask our EPAct team to just give a little wave on the screen. We have a big team. And I really want to emphasize that each member of this team is well-equipped to answer your questions and support you with compliance. So I'll go around and just call out their names, and then we'll move forward with our agenda.

So we have Deborah Gross from CACI. She helps a lot with the reporting submittals. We have the ICF team, Emily, and Han, and Sophia, and Matt. And they are very well equipped to help with questions about requirements. And then we have the NREL team. So that's myself, and Ted Sears, and Darlene Steward.

So with that, I'll talk a little bit about just the background of the program, the Energy Policy Act or EPAct of 1992 established the state and alternative fuel provider fleet program. And it has been amended several times since then.

The program is administered by the US Department of Energy and requires that state and alternative fuel provider fleets, or as we call covered fleets, acquire alternative fuel vehicles as a percentage of their light duty vehicle acquisition or to employ other petroleum reduction methods in lieu of acquiring AFVs. As you can see on the screen here, we list the alternative fuels that as defined by this program.

The primary goal of this program is to reduce petroleum consumption by generating a core market for alternative fuel vehicles. And today, there are over 300 fleets covered by this program.

So a brief overview of standard compliance, there are two ways to comply with this program, standard compliance and alternative compliance, which I'll touch on next. So almost all covered fleets utilize standard compliance, which is the focus of today's webinar. Fleets and standard compliance must acquire a certain percentage of their light duty non-excluded vehicles as alternative fuel vehicles.

That percentage for state fleets is 75%. And for alternative fuel providers, it's 90%. And fleets can meet their AFV acquisition requirement in a variety of ways. And those are listed on the slide here. And we'll talk through those strategies as we demo the reporting tool, so I won't go into much detail here.

I do want to emphasize that there are some caveats to many of these ways to earn credit. So it's important for fleets to read the associated guidance documents which we will have linked at the end of this presentation.

So the next is alternative compliance. As I mentioned, this is the second method by which fleets can comply with this program. We won't talk much about it today because there are less than 10 fleets that comply utilizing this method.

So if you have questions about alternative compliance, please feel free to reach out to any one of us. And we're happy to talk with you further about it. But as a brief overview, alternative compliance is a good option for fleets that maybe have a significant number of medium or heavy duty vehicles that are capable of using biodiesel in excess of the 50% cap associated with standard compliance or are capable of using other alternative fuels.

Oftentimes, it's also a good option for fleets that are subject to state or local requirements or policies that call for petroleum reduction, reductions in carbon footprint or greenhouse gas emissions.

So essentially, alternative compliance requires that fleets submit reports detailing their petroleum reduction through several permitted strategies, and those are listed on this slide. And again, if you have questions or are interested in just learning more about alternative compliance, we recommend that you reach out to us.

So turning back to standard compliance, fleets may submit annual reports in one of two ways. The first is the report online. This is the reporting tool that we'll walk you through here in just a minute. And we really emphasize and recommend that folks use this online reporting tool because it's designed to be user friendly and ensure that the reporting for you is as seamless as possible. The second method is via spreadsheet, which you can also access on our website.

And finally, I want to emphasize that it is reporting season. If you haven't seen reporting reminder emails yet in your inbox, I encourage you to check your spam just in case that's where they're going. And reporting season opened September 1. It will close at the end of the year. So this year, that's December 31, at which time you need to have submitted your model year 2024 report.

So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Darlene, who will walk us through the online tool.

DARLENE STEWARD: Thanks, Erin. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and get started. So hopefully, everyone can see my screen.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: No, we can. You're good

DARLENE STEWARD: No, you can. OK, great. Sorry, that took a minute. Sometimes it takes a second to switch over. All right. So welcome, everyone, and thanks for taking the time to join the webinar.

I'm going to just briefly walk through the standard compliance reporting using the online EPAct reporting tool. But first, I wanted to start with just a couple of things on this main screen here. So this is the home page for the state and alternative fuel provider fleets.

We try to curate the really important aspects of the program here. And so you can always click on this Home button to get to this screen that can guide you through the rest of the program.

I also want to point out that this reporting link here always takes you to the login screen for your report. So no matter where you are within any of the EPAct website pages, that reporting link will always be in the upper right hand corner. So you can always get to that very quickly.

So I did want to point out a couple of things here. One was the compliance schedule that Erin just showed us that shows always the current date as well as where we are in the compliance schedule. So I wanted to make sure everyone knows that.

And then the other thing is the Frequently Asked Questions page. And that is taking a moment to load here. I do not know why this is not behaving. I'm going to stop sharing my screen for a moment and see if I can get this to behave a little bit better here.

All right. Let's try that again.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: Darlene I can drop the link to that page in the chat and maybe other people's internet is going to be more cooperative.

DARLENE STEWARD: Yeah.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: There we go. All right. We got there.

DARLENE STEWARD: Just taking a moment. Sorry about that. These things always work when you're testing them, and then you get to the real thing. OK, so the Frequently Asked Questions page, this is questions that fleet managers have asked in the past.

They're grouped up by topic, but you can also search for the question that you have. And this is very handy for answering questions. If you still have questions, obviously, or you have a very specific question for your fleet, please get in touch with us.

The only other thing that I wanted to point out here was that if you do have any problems with the website, it doesn't seem to be behaving the way it should, try to note down what you were trying to do, where you were in the program, maybe even take some screenshots and get in touch with us. Websites do break occasionally. And we'd like to as soon as possible so we can get things fixed.

OK. So we're going to go now to the Login page for the compliance reporting. So on this page, this is where you log in to your account. I do want to point out that if you are a new fleet manager, either for a fleet that's brand new to the program or if you're taking over for someone else, please create a new user login for yourself, create a new account for yourself.

And what you'll do is you'll just click on the Request New Fleet Access button there. That will bring up a form that's very straightforward to fill out. You submit that form. Deb will approve you as a new fleet. And she'll get you hooked up with the fleets for your company.

And we'll also send you a fleet welcome packet that has a lot of useful information about reporting in there. Please don't use a previous POC's login and things like that. We want to have you make your own.

So we're going to go ahead and log in here. So this is our opening screen for our fleet for our account. I just want to point out a couple of things here before we get started on our reporting.

This My Account sidebar here allows you to update your personal information, your phone number, your email address, login information, that sort of thing. Please keep that up to date. That's the only way that we have to contact you. So if you could make sure that that's up to date at all times, that would be great.

And then I happen to have two fleets. A lot of people only have one, but you can select your fleet here. And if you just click on that, that brings you to the main fleet management screen for that fleet.

I do want to point out a couple of things here. One is that you can view previous years reports here. And you can also download them. They're compiled in a PDF file, so you can download them, or you can just click on this down button to give you a summary of your previous year's reports, if you'd like to see that.

You also can look at your credit trades from previous years. That can help you. If you want to make trades in the future, you maybe want to contact that same fleet, so you can look at those there.

But if we go back to our annual reporting, then we can start looking at our report. So as Erin mentioned, we are looking at standard compliance reporting today. So we're going to click on that.

So we can see two fleet reports here, model year 2024 and model year 2025. Excuse me. So the model year 2025 report is available. We are currently in model year 2025. So if you were to purchase vehicles right now, those would go on your 2025 report.

We encourage you to go ahead and enter those in the model year 2025 report as soon as you get them. So that helps you do this as you acquire vehicles. And so it lessens your burden at the end of the year. And that can really help streamline the process.

But for this year, we are reporting for vehicles and infrastructure and so forth that were acquired in model year 2024 that ended at the end of August this year. So we're going to go ahead and click on that report. So this is the first page of the reporting.

So the first thing that we want to do is enter the number of light duty vehicles that we acquired during the year. This is the total number of non-excluded light-duty vehicles that your fleet acquired in model year 2024. That includes both conventional fuel vehicles and alternative fuel vehicles.

So our fleet acquired 10 vehicles. And since this is a state fleet, our AFV requirement was 75% of that. So we need to acquire or accumulate eight LDV AFV credits for the year. Now that can be either vehicles or biodiesel or infrastructure and other investments. So cumulative, we need to get to eight.

So the one other thing I want to point out before we get too much further here is these highlighted text and the little question mark here. This gives you more information about that particular topic. So these can be very handy to remind you of, for example, here what excluded vehicles are.

All right. So we've entered the number of vehicles that we have in our fleet and/or that we acquired this year. And so let's move on to the vehicle screen. So this is the next step. We enter any light-duty and medium and heavy-duty vehicles that we acquired in model year 2024.

As you can see, I have several vehicles in here. Some of these are pretty similar to each other. These accurate test vehicles. They're both electric vehicles. So one handy feature is that you can copy a vehicle if you purchased a number that are quite similar to each other.

The application does not let you duplicate VIN numbers. So you do need to make sure that you update the VIN for that number. But this gives you a quick way to enter vehicles if you have a number that are quite similar.

OK. So this VIN has already been added. So that's a good thing to know. And let's see if we can get it to save this time. So that is a quick way to enter similar vehicles. You can also just edit a vehicle. For example, this Silverado here I did not actually-- this is not actually an EV, but I wasn't quite sure what the vehicle type actually was. This is a tricky field that codes here for the vehicle type.

And so we put together a vehicle decision tree to help you decide which code to use for that. So I'm just going to click on that. And this gives us our vehicle decision tree. The vehicle that I actually purchased there, that Silverado was an E85 vehicle. So let's go ahead and just get started here.

The vehicle cannot be plugged in. It does not have an electric motor. So we want to select ALDV, which is a light or medium-duty vehicle that operates on an alternative fuel. OK, so let's go back and enter ALDV here. Sorry. And that is ALDV.

All right, so now let's us pick the fuel type as ethanol. And the engine configuration is a dual fuel or flex fuel vehicle. So we don't need to enter the zip code or this internal ID. Those are both all optional, so we'll go ahead and save that.

Then the only other thing that I wanted to point out here on this sheet was that we have this medium heavy-duty CNG vehicle. And you'll notice that we're not getting credit for that. We're getting credit for these four, but we're not getting credit for that vehicle.

That is because medium and heavy-duty vehicles you do not get credit for those until you have met your requirement. Go ahead and enter them, though, because once you've met your requirement, then you can get bank credits from for those vehicles.

OK, so let's move on to biodiesel. We did have some biodiesel that we used in our medium and heavy-duty vehicles in 2024. So the value that you're supposed to enter in this field is the amount of B100. So this is the pure biodiesel.

Most people use a blend of biodiesel fuel, so it's maybe 20% pure biodiesel. We want to enter only that 20% value, not the full amount of blend that you purchase. We also created a little calculator to help calculate what that amount should be.

So if we entered a number of gallons of the blend, and it's a 20% blend, that means that we purchased 9,000 gallons of biodiesel or pure biodiesel. Sorry. I want to do that. We just want to import that total. That puts the total in our little box there and saves it for us. OK, so we got 9,000 gallons of biodiesel. And that gives us four credits towards our requirement.

OK, so let's move on to investments. So you'll notice that there are four of categories of investments that we can look at. One is alternative fueling infrastructure. And this is things like electric vehicle plug-in chargers and/or an E85 station or a CNG gas station, something like that.

We can also get credit for non-road equipment that is operated on alternative fuel. It's important to note that it needs to be operated on alternative fuels. So this would include things like an electric forklift, for example, or a tractor, or something like that.

And then the emerging technologies category includes electric drive, vehicles that are pre-commercial. So this would be, for example, if you're a university and you're testing a new hydrogen vehicle, for example, those are electric hydrogen, operates an electric motor. So those are technologies, vehicles that are not yet commercial. This is quite rare. Most fleets do not have these.

And then the final category is aggregated investments. We can see here that we got one credit from our $34,000 investment in infrastructure. You get one credit for every $25,000 of investment. And that's in whole increments of $25,000. So we had $9,000. That is excess from our infrastructure investment.

If we had some non-road equipment investment, that also came out to slightly more than, say, 50,000 or something like that. Then those aggregated investments, once that reaches $25,000, you would get another credit for that. So that's helpful to know.

Again, they're pretty straightforward, but I'm going to go ahead and just step through this really quickly. So this is a public electric charging station. The address is pretty-- the information here is pretty straightforward.

One thing I want to note here is that you should consider making these infrastructure investments fueling stations and so forth accessible to the public because you get more credit for those. You can get up to 10 credits for publicly accessible infrastructure where you can only get five credits for private infrastructure.

If you invest quite a lot of money, that can make a difference in the amount of credits that you get. So this particular one is publicly accessible. And then it has the fuel type and so forth. Now for the investment, it's important that you only include the amount here that was not the result of a grant or some kind of monetary award. So you can't take grant money and use it as an investment here to get credit for these infrastructure investments.

If you apply some grant money and also there's some company money or money from another source, then you just need to subtract out that money that came from a grant or some type of award and then the remainder is what you can get credit for. So this little checkbox here is a certification that indeed the investment was not made from grant money. And then just fill out the remainder of this information for that fleet. We're going to go ahead and save that.

So I want to look at the non-road investment one as well. As you can see here, we have this electric Zamboni that we purchased for the company ice rink. And it says it's electricity here, and I invested $42,000, but I don't see that up here.

The reason for that is that you have to indicate that this equipment was operated on alternative fuel. You can only get credit for these off-road equipment purchases that are for vehicles that are operated or non-road vehicles that are operated on alternative fuels. So we'll just select that.

And then again, we can select the fuel type here. Same constraints apply for the investment. You need to certify that the money, the value that you're putting in here for the investment, none of that came from a grant or award money.

OK. So let's go ahead and save that. That gives us-- now we have gotten credit for our non-road equipment. We got one credit. And we had some money left over from that. That amounted to more than $25,000. So we also got one credit from our aggregated credits.

OK, so let's move on to the report. So this is the last step in the process. You want to really review this pretty carefully, make sure that all of this information is correct, that you accounted for all the vehicles that you acquired and so forth because once you submit the report, you won't be able to make changes to it.

So one thing I want to point out here is that, for example, with the biodiesel or with the infrastructure investments, even if you have exceeded your requirement for the year, go ahead and enter that information because if you exceed your requirement, you can bank those excess credits for future years.

So it's really important to get as much credit as you can each year. That gives you some leeway and some cushion to be able to use those credits in the future if you need them. And for example, with the biodiesel or with investments, even if you have already met your requirement, go ahead and enter that information.

The other thing that I pointed out earlier that I just want to remind you of is that medium and heavy-duty vehicles, you can get credit for those vehicles once you have met your requirements. So you will now get credit for those vehicles. So we have on here just a summary of the credits that we got.

Notice that we did get our credit now for the medium and heavy-duty vehicle. And then the credit summary here, our requirement was eight. Alternative fuel vehicle credits. We got 11 credits in the combination from our vehicles, and our biodiesel, and our investments. And so we have no credit shortfall.

The credit balance, we had seven bank credits at the beginning of the year. And because we exceeded our requirement, we get four projected credits, bank to bank this year. So for next year, we'll have 11 banked credits.

And then we have this information about applying bank credits. So we do not need to apply bank credits. But if you are still short in any reporting year, not necessarily this year, but if in subsequent years, you're not able to purchase alternative fuel vehicles for whatever reason, you can apply your bank credits to make up that shortfall.

You can also sell or acquire credits from another fleet. So this checkbox here, if you check this box, it allows us to publish your fleet in our list of fleets that might be willing to sell credits. So if you do have a lot of excess credits that you're willing to sell to another fleet, you can certainly check that box. It's obviously not required in any way.

So we have an excess credits bulletin board. If you need credits, you can go there, search for fleets that may be able to sell you credits. The trades between fleets are completely between those fleets. We approve the transaction just insofar as certifying that or verifying that the selling fleet actually has those credits to sell and that the receiving fleet actually receives them. But other than that, we do not get involved in that transaction.

So what you would do is you would just download the credit trade form. And the two fleets would fill it out and submit that form to the program. We approve it and make that transfer of credits. So that's how that works.

On the report, we also have area where you can enter information about any additional fleets. So if for example, you're filling out one report for a number of, for example, I'm a state fleet. If I'm filling out a report that includes different departments within the state, I can enter those here.

Again, it's completely optional, but it does help us keep track of how many fleets are actually included. And we won't perhaps bug you about fleets that look like they should be submitting annual reports but are not. So that's a helpful way to keep track of which fleets you're reporting for, again, completely optional. Both of those things are completely optional for you. So we would click the Submit Report button. And that gives us a little notification that the report has been submitted.

The next step is that our fleet database administrator, Deb Gross, will look through the report and verify, for example, that the alternative fuel vehicles are indeed alternative fuel vehicles and approve that report. You'll get a notification with your credit summary. And as we discussed earlier, you can see your previous year's reports on the View Reports page.

So that kind of wraps up looking at our walk-through of the report. So we have some time for questions.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: Thanks so much, Darlene. We'll kick it over to Matt Bradley to close this out. And then we can open it up for Q&A.

MATT BRADLEY: Thanks, Erin and Darlene. Hi, everyone. I'll keep this brief so we have plenty of time for questions. I'm just going to quickly discuss what to do if a fleet falls short of its AFV acquisition requirements.

You have three options. Your first and best option would be to apply banked credits that you've already earned over the years to the program. You also have the option to trade credits with other covered fleets if necessary.

As Darlene mentioned, there is a list on the website for fleets that are willing to trade or sell credits. So you can peruse that list and reach out to other fleets to see if they'd be willing to trade or sell you a credit.

And also as a last resort, you have the ability to apply for exemption due to lack of available alternative fuel vehicles, lack of an alternative fuel, or an unreasonable financial hardship.

If you do have to fall on that last resort and apply for an exemption, exemption requests can only be submitted after a fleet submits its annual report. So you would submit your report first and then apply for the exemption. The exemption is due on no later than January 31 after that reporting season.

I also wanted to mention that we have the regulatory information line available for help. Feel free to reach out as much as you need to. I know there's some questions in the chat regarding reaching out, regarding reporting help. We're happy to set up a call to walk you through that.

If you want to reach out to us, they're happy to set up a call to walk you through reporting as well through there. And also, again, you can reach out via email or via phone, and we monitor that chat. I'm sorry, that line.

Next slide. Yes, we have some resources here, very helpful, all available on the program's website. A few key resources to highlight on this page, and again, you'll have access to this one.

The slide deck goes out, but standard compliance guidance document, which is very helpful. It will provide you with the information that Erin reviewed earlier, and the presentation, including acquisition credits and how to comply with the program. So that's a great place to start if you have any questions.

Regulations are also available, including the Energy Policy Act, which established the program. And I also can't recommend enough their Frequently Asked Questions part of the website, super helpful. It provides a wealth of information about everything from credit allocation how to evaluate whether a vehicle is an alternative fuel vehicle and how to comply with your annual reporting.

Also, there's some training resources on there. Webinars are posted after, so you can refer to them as well. There's some webinars from past years on there. And there's also some things like case studies and things like that under training resources. So those are helpful as well.

And lastly, the next slide, I just want to mention that we do want your feedback. We do value that. Appreciate everyone reaching out in the chat and asking questions, giving feedback. We're also going to post, copy a link to a survey in there as well. If you would like to complete that, it's a brief survey. And again, that's going to go help and just let us know what type help you need to comply with the program.

So if you want to reach out to us through that survey, and that just ensures that we're providing appropriate and relevant compliance assistance and giving us directions on what type of information and tools we can provide to you all to support your AFV transitions and fleet electrification goals.

So again, just feel free to use that survey to let us know what resources would be helpful to you as you integrate AFV into your fleet and comply with the program. All right. Thanks, everybody.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: All right. With that, we will open it up for questions. I think Joanna is going to help us gauge if there are questions that we missed in the chat. And then also feel free to raise your hand, come off mute or type new questions in the chat.

JOANNA ALLERHAND: Yeah, most of them have been answered in the chat, but let me just do another quick scroll through.

DARLENE STEWARD: It looked like there was another question in the chat about maybe walking through the vehicle entry form in a little bit more detail. I'd be happy to share my screen and look at that if needed.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: I think that's great. Let's do that, Darlene, if you don't mind.

DARLENE STEWARD: Sure.

JOANNA ALLERHAND: And while she's pulling up her screen, we've got a question. Should they do any reporting for biodiesel below B20?

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: Thanks, Joanna. Let's see. Can we get somebody from the ACF team on that question. And while we're on that, I will drop in-- we have a whole biodiesel compliance guide. And I'll drop that link in the chat for folks.

JOANNA ALLERHAND: Thanks, Erin. And Stephen, does that answer your question about are there any special requirements for heavy-duty public transit fleets that are on diesel/biodiesel?

STEPHEN: Yeah, no, that's very helpful. I'll take a look at the guide. Thank you.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: Great. And I'm just dropping in the chat straight from the guide so that you all have it. It must be in blends of at least 20%. There's more information in that guidance document. Feel free to look into that. But for standard compliance, it must be at least 20%.

JOANNA ALLERHAND: And similarly, does R99 qualify in this context as a biodiesel?

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: By R99, do you mean renewable?

JOANNA ALLERHAND: Erin do you want to come off mute and clarify?

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: Yes. Yes. OK. Thank you.

TED SEARS: R99 is viewed as BD100.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: Thanks, Ted.

DARLENE STEWARD: All right. I'll just take a moment here to go through once we pause the questions for a moment to go through this vehicle data entry form again. As you can see, there's a number of different help buttons in this form as well.

If for example, for the make and manufacturer, we have a dropdown list of here of common vehicle manufacturers. If you don't see yours, select Other. And you can just enter the manufacturer there. So you can see there's a long list of different manufacturers.

So the model, again, you just enter this. You don't have to be particularly accurate about this. We would like to be as consistent as possible. But this is just a field that you fill in. It's not a dropdown list.

So then, as I mentioned earlier, the VIN number has to be unique. And the application will let if you try to save it with a non-unique VIN number. If you're entering a lot of vehicles, it can be very easy to accidentally duplicate a VIN number.

So this is actually helpful for the program as well as for you to make sure that you don't enter duplicate vehicles, especially if you enter them over a period of time. You may forget that you have entered that particular vehicle before.

The acquisition date is when you actually acquired the vehicle. And that would be when you took possession or control of the vehicle. This includes vehicles that you leased as well. So at least you can include lease vehicles. As long as they are alternative fuel vehicles, you can include those in your report.

But this is when you actually took possession of the vehicle. So some fleets have encountered a situation where, for example, they put in an order for new vehicles in July, say, and for some reason there was a delay and they didn't get them until September.

In that case, you can contact the program, and we can help you work through whether you want to report those on. For this case, it would be model year 2024 report or whether you want to report those on your model year 2025 report. We're pretty flexible about that. So just let us know something like that happens.

So the weight class, we did include the actual weight here. The cutoff between light-duty and heavy-duty is what this is. It's really after here. As I noted earlier, when we were talking about medium and heavy-duty vehicles, you can't really get credit for those vehicles until you've already met your requirement with light-duty vehicles and investments and so forth. So it makes a difference whether what the gross vehicle weight of that vehicle is.

We also have neighborhood electric vehicles that you can select. Those vehicles are things like golf carts. This is what you should think of there. And a lot of companies use those for getting around the company campus or whatever. A lot of them are electric. So you can get a small amount of credit for those. It's only one fourth credit. But if you have them, you should certainly enter them there.

The neighborhood electric vehicles, you can see here that if I select neighborhood electric vehicle, the category and the vehicle type are not editable. So those are automatically filled in. So is the electricity and so is the inner engine configuration. So I can't modify those if I select neighborhood electric vehicle. So that helps us narrow down some of the choices for specific types of vehicles.

So again, the category, this is just to give a little bit more information about these types of vehicles. Whatever you select here does not really dictate anything that follows. So none of the other dropdown boxes will really be dependent upon this. But, for example, if we select light-duty pickup, that's not going to change anything in terms of the vehicle type or any of that sort of stuff.

So the vehicle type here, this is the one that people get really hung up on. I apologize. We had to come up with some codes for the various vehicle types. And they are quite specific. So if you are unsure of what the vehicle type is, don't just throw something in there. Go ahead and use the vehicle decision tree. It's very helpful in figuring out which type of code you should use there.

So for example, if we have a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, we would say yes, it can be plugged in. Now if you recall, last time we selected No, and we got a different set of questions to answer. So this time we selected Yes. The question is, does it also have an internal combustion engine? So this is a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. So yes, it does.

And then the question is, can that internal combustion engine operate on a liquid or gaseous alternative fuel? So for example, if you had a plug-in vehicle that operated on E85, for example, for the liquid fuel part of the vehicle, that you would answer yes here. In this case, we're just using-- this is just a gasoline vehicle, plug-in hybrid electric gasoline vehicle.

And then for plug-in hybrids, it asks yet another question about this. And this is whether it meets the NHTSA minimum driving range criteria for a dual fueled electric automobile. This can be a little bit complicated to answer.

I understand that these days the majority of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles meet this requirement, but you can find out that information. Either ask us. We can help you figure that out. The alternative fuels data center also has a lot of information about the classification of different vehicles.

JOANNA ALLERHAND: Darlene.

DARLENE STEWARD: Go ahead. Sorry to interrupt.

JOANNA ALLERHAND: On that note, we have a couple questions about the decision tree overall and where to find the information for it.

DARLENE STEWARD: So where to find the information for answering the questions in the decision tree?

JOANNA ALLERHAND: Yeah.

DARLENE STEWARD: So let's go back to--

JOANNA ALLERHAND: For instance, on question number 2, I'm not sure where to find the answer for that one.

DARLENE STEWARD: So I believe that the alternative fuels data center vehicle search tool has a description of vehicles in terms of whether they have an internal combustion engine in addition to the electric motor.

When you purchase the vehicle, they should have that information also in the purchase documentation. Ted or anybody from ICF, do you have any other ideas about where you could find that information.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: I did drop the link to the AFDC vehicle search in the chat if that's helpful to anyone. We know this information can be hard to get if you're getting information from other people and you're not the ones directly ordering the vehicles and things like that. And Matt dropped a very helpful link in the chat as well about knowing the GVWR for various vehicle types. Yes.

JOANNA ALLERHAND: We've got about 3 minutes left. And Mike has had their hand raised for a while, so I want to give him a chance.

DARLENE STEWARD: All right. I think we've covered at least hopefully a little bit more of a tour of the website, so take it away.

MIKE: Thank you. I have a few questions. So just a general question. Say you retire three vehicles from your fleet, but you only replace one of them. If you don't have any credits, are you still in the situation where you need to buy a credit or trade for a credit or pay the fine?

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: Mike, are you saying in a year in which you only acquired one alternative fuel vehicle?

MIKE: In a year, yeah. Say, this year, we retired three. Let's just say we retired three gas vehicles, and we replaced it with one gas vehicle. We did not replace it with an alternative fuel. So are we in a situation where we need to either pay the fine or purchase a credit from another institution?

TED SEARS: Yeah. I'll just jump in the. Unfortunately, Mike, the program does not acknowledge retirements or rightsizing your fleet, if you will for purposes of earning credit because it is focused on light-duty, alternative fuel vehicles acquisitions is the target. So yes, the short answer is yes. There's still a requirement that adheres to acquiring that vehicle.

MIKE: OK. All right.

TED SEARS: And so credit is probably the best solution.

MIKE: We don't have any credits.

TED SEARS: You may recall a prior slide. I think these slides will be available. And this information is available on the website as well as steps you can take. If you have a credit, that's the first step. And the second step is to acquire a credit. And you can obtain those.

I saw there was a question in there earlier about what they tend to cost. We don't collect that information, so we can't speak to that per se. We have anecdotal information that it can range anywhere from $500 to $1,500, but it varies.

It depends on if you're buying perhaps from another or acquiring from another entity within your state. If you're a state agency, perhaps sometimes there's trading within state agencies, so I can't speak specifically to that, but it's probably your most cost effective approach.

MIKE: So I guess what kind of information is required for a financial exemption? And after you fill in your report, I don't have a credit, so I'm sitting here that I'm going to have to pay a fine. But I'm going to submit financial exemption.

TED SEARS: Yeah, I think, I would ask if maybe Emily or Matt might be able to just give-- there's probably a lengthy answer. There is a lengthy answer, but if there's a short one just given our time and then we can also refer people to-- there's plenty of information online. We have a guidance which sets forth in bullet format, this is the information that's required.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: I can go ahead and drop the exemptions guidance in the chat.

TED SEARS: Mike so it's not a-- most of these guidance documents are intentionally short because we know that people are busy, and the idea is not to sit down and have to read a novel about any of these particular topics. So we try to get right to the point.

EMILY WHITE: Yeah. So I'll just jump in really quickly. I know Erin just dropped the link in. But if you scroll down to page 5 and 6, that's where it lists all the documents that you would need to provide to support your exemption request.

So the one that you're asking about, Mike, the unreasonable financial hardship that requires an explanation of why that's warranted detail on the steps taken by the fleet to try to achieve or, I guess, earn credits under the program through the other various methods that are available.

And then the total fleet budget for light-duty vehicle acquisitions as well as price differentials between conventional light-duty vehicles as well as alternative fuel light duty vehicles. So please give that a read-through. And if you have any additional questions about that, please don't hesitate to reach out to the regulatory information line, and we can discuss further with you.

MIKE: OK. Thank you.

TED SEARS: Yeah. And Mike, I'll just add also and for anyone else on the undue financial hardship none have ever been issued for that. And they tend not to be sought because the information that's needed would require a full on budget if you're with a state to see your entire state budget to say that you couldn't come up with the funds. So it's a high hurdle.

So the other exemptions which are for no fuel available or there's no vehicle model available, those would be a better approach if you were going to seek an exemption. Undue financial hardship is a tough nut to crack, just a little inside baseball. Hope that's helpful.

ERIN ANDREWS-SHARER: I will say I'm going to call out a couple of things that I see in the chat. And I know we're 3 minutes over, so then we can wrap up. Patrick mentioned that he's a fleet manager and has some ideas about collecting internal data and how you can make sure you get the right information.

I'd say to anyone who is not necessarily a fleet manager but is reporting this information, reach out to your fleet manager if you have questions about the specific vehicles and things like that.

We understand that you might not have all of the information readily accessible and so now is the time to start figuring out how to get that information in order to put it into the report.

And again, I just want to also emphasize that if you are new to the program, haven't done this report before, we have a wealth of information online and through our team as well. So if you want to set up a time to talk one on one with us and think through your strategy and what information you have, what information you might need to gather, the ICF team is fantastic.

And they are really well equipped to help you start thinking through that process. And then, again, Deb does the ins and outs of the reporting. So both of those contact information, the phone numbers and emails, will be in the slide deck that we post online. So please, please don't hesitate to reach out.

And if we haven't addressed your question, we will get the chat information and we'll make sure to reach out to you directly with information regarding your question that's in the chat.

All right. And with that, thank you all so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. We will post a recording of the front half, not the Q&A portion, but the front half on the website. And we'll let you know when that recording goes live. Thank you.