States have led the United States’ transportation electrification race for years, and are accelerating action to adopt and implement electric vehicle (EV) policies, regulations, and programs. That means laws and regulations developed at the state level can have an outsized impact on enabling our clean transportation future.
To better understand how one state is doing this, Energy Innovation’s Senior Director of Electrification Sara Baldwin went straight from the source on the latest Electrify This! podcast episode. Nevada State Assemblyman Howard Watts shares his insights on state policymaking, the challenges and opportunities state policymakers face advancing clean transportation, and what Nevada is doing to move EVs forward.
Q: What is your background and what prompted you to go into politics and serve in public office?
I was born and raised in Las Vegas, so I grew up here. I went to college here and got involved early on in a lot of community service work and non-profits. Giving back to the community in some forms has always been important to me. And then I spent time working with advocacy organizations issues related to voting rights and civic engagement. Then I began working on conservation issues; particularly issues related to water, which is an extremely scarce resource out here. When the opportunity came up to be more than the one asking others to make a change, but to be able to run for office and make the change myself, I jumped at it. Now I’m in my third term and have had the honor of chairing committees that look at natural resource issues.
This last session, I was in charge on our committee of looking at energy and transportation issues. I’ve gotten more and more involved in the conservation world, and spending time in the great outdoors, which has become a personal passion in many ways. This is both in the things that I enjoy, as well as the issues that I work on.
Q: Why do you think some of the transportation policies, adopted in the state legislature’s most recent session are so important?
We’ve worked with our utilities and directed significant investments in EV infrastructure. We were one of the first states to help support the development of EV charging across our highway system. We created an electric highway program and started to deploy charging stations across our state. In the last election, we elected a new governor and had split governance. So, Democrats were in control of the legislature, but we had a Republican governor get elected.
The last administration adopted advanced clean cars. The new administration wasn’t interested in moving to advanced clean cars or advanced clean trucks, at least not at this time. Our governor withdrew Nevada from the U.S. Climate Alliance, so there were some challenges, but also some opportunities.
We have the Tesla Gigafactory here, so we have advanced manufacturing. The only energy resources that we have within our state are clean energy resources.
I really worked on two main pieces of policy. One was to lead by example and set a policy for our state vehicle fleet to move towards zero emissions. The simplest way to do that is to do a lifecycle cost analysis. We budget in a very short term and try and determine how to stretch those dollars that are in our budget for the next year or two years.
Those vehicles are going to be in our state fleet for 10 years, and a hundred thousand miles. When you look at the fueling and maintenance savings, and factor everything in, zero emission vehicles are now competitive and probably a better investment.
The other policy I worked on was an incentive program, and it was specifically aimed at larger vehicles rather than passenger vehicles. These include medium and heavy-duty vehicles. They make up a very small share of the vehicles on our roadway, but a large share of the vehicle pollution that gets emitted in our state.
I worked with advocates to craft a policy that creates tiered incentives based on the vehicle’s size. We also wanted to prioritize small businesses, minority owned businesses, investments in tribal communities, and historically marginalized communities, including school districts.
I think these are both policies that are going to really help take our leadership to the next level for EV and zero emissions transportation policy.
Q: What are some of the challenges you’re facing, along with the approaches and solutions you are working on to help overcome them?
We’re a very large state in terms of landmass, but we’re also very urbanized in terms of population. And at the state level, how do we support people who are traveling across the state? How do we support these rural communities so that nobody is left behind? So, we were one of the first states to start the Electric Highway Program and put in charging stations across the state.
I recently became an EV owner myself. I was so happy, and I thought, ‘wow, we are really ahead of the curve’ until I realized that a couple stations sometimes have a charger that isn’t functioning, is at full capacity, or some of the charging speeds are a little bit slower. So, there’s still a lot to be done to make this easier for people.
In 2021, we passed legislation to direct utility to make a significant hundred-million-dollar investment in EV charging infrastructure. That includes everything from the wires, the distribution systems, substations, transformers, everything we need from that core infrastructure to support additional charging, as well as to help deploy additional charging stations.
There was also an equity component to make sure that all communities in our urban areas are going to have access. We’ve also been lucky, thanks to the Biden Administration’s Clean Energy Plan. The NEVI (National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure) program supports additional EV charging across our highway network. Therefore, our Department of Transportation is currently working on a plan to deploy those funds to build this out. The goal is to get rid of range anxiety as people are traveling over hundreds of miles across our state and increase their confidence that they will be able to find places to charge.
Q: What advice would you give state policymakers working on this issue in their state, who also want to advance EVs, attract jobs and businesses?
The focus is making sure that there are strong equity programs in place to make sure no communities are left behind. As this transition continues to accelerate for folks who are looking to build their leadership or get on the map, I would say that the policy landscape is really changing quickly, and the market is changing quickly.
There are a lot of opportunities that aren’t necessarily partisan where you can work with a lot of these stakeholders that might disagree on some bigger picture climate change policy. When you look at this, including the health and economic impacts, there are opportunities to work better together.
We’re creating some incentive and voluntary programs and figuring out what can help provide financial and infrastructural support. People can always help by getting involved in these. So, I would just encourage folks to reach out to all those different stakeholders because they might be surprised about some of the ideas that folks align around. From there, we can try to craft policy with a solid base of support.
No matter how people feel about the bipartisan infrastructure law or the Inflation Reduction Act right now, those funds are becoming available. And I encourage every community to take advantage of the opportunity to get their slice of that pie and deploy it. At the end of the day, it’s going to create jobs and an economic impact.
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