The Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research and educational foundation dedicated to increasing sustainable use of resources, is leading “Project Get Ready,” aimed at coordinating different U.S. cities’ approaches to increasing plug-in readiness.

Project Get Ready has compiled a “menu” of the best practices that can help cities promote the increase of electric vehicle usage, from consumer awareness efforts to policy suggestions.  PGR currently has fourteen partner cities, including Houston, Texas and Portland, Oregon.

One of the main goals of PGR is to encourage participation by civic groups, in order to bring together community and governmental interests and to further consumer readiness for and awareness of PEV use.

The online database created by PGR includes suggestions for the various players involved in the creation of a PEV infrastructure including: municipal governments, utility agencies, local businesses, civic groups, and a variety of other organizations such as developers, schools and philanthropists.

Some American cities are far ahead of others in terms of PEV readiness; thus, Project Get Ready intends to take advantage of the strategies already being used in order to disseminate them to a wider national audience, in order to truly spread use of plug-in electric vehicles.

Project Get Ready seeks to solve four problems:

– Regional leaders often call participants and ask “how do I become a leader” and we don’t have a great answer;
– OEMs are nervous that consumers won’t adopt plug-ins because the cars will be too strange (have early-stage snafus), have high costs, and infrastructure won’t be in place;
– Infrastructure is expensive. Who will pay?
– Several cities are taking aggressive and excellent action to implement plug-ins, but their approaches and lessons learned aren’t coordinated.

These problems can be overcome if cities/regions become ecosystems that welcome plug-ins. To create such an ecosystem, incentives need to be put in ranging from financial incentives, to “luxuries”, advertising, job training, education, service, and more.

How can a city become a plug-in pioneer?

Being a pioneer in the green mobility revolution of plug in vehicles (what are plug in vehicles?) requires change from a wide variety of interwoven players. There are three steps.

1. Get Ready: form a coalition of leaders in your community, including (but not limited to) utilities, municipal government, citizen activists, auto dealers, transportation authorities, local employers. Select a “champion” for your coalition.
2. Get Set: Create a charter, or five year plan, for your city readiness with clear goals and milestones. Get coalition members to sign on and commit necessary time and funds to make it happen. Project Get Ready’s menu can provide a foundation for this charter, which you can amend to fit your own community.
3. Go!: Start executing your charter.

Project Get Ready will:

• Create a dynamic “menu” of strategic actions that city and regional leaders can inact to be a plug-in pioneer, based on input from technical advisers and cities already engaged in implementing plug-ins. In this menu, RMI will analyze the “business case” for each action from the perspective of several key stakeholders (city gov’t, employers, consumers, etc.)
• Provide a web database of all national (and some international) plug-in readiness activities.
• Work one-on-one with at least 5 cities on creating their coalitions and charters.
• Convene at least 20 cities as well as technical players regularly to discuss their lessons learned and best practices, and report these conversations on our website and materials.
• Some of our partner cities will have their own plans underway, others will be starting from the ground up.
• Provide a benchmark that will allow cities/regions to “prove” that they are ready for mass adoption of PHEVs/EVs, and have taken meaningful steps to support this critical green technology (this may take the form of a seal of approval or certification like the LEED system that gauges readiness).
• Document the progress made by participant cities in order to help quantify future demand and make it more transparent to industry (how much, where, and what type of support to expect) for PHEVs/EVs.
• Provide helpful background and educational material on plug-in readiness.