Electric vehicle charging stations: reliability standards: low-income and disadvantaged community financial assistance.

Existing law requires the State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission (Energy Commission) , working with the State Air Resources Board and the Public Utilities Commission, to prepare and update, as provided, a statewide assessment of the electric vehicle charging infrastructure needed to support the levels of electric vehicle adoption required for the state to meet its goals of putting at least 5,000,000 zero-emission vehicles on California roads by 2030, and of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. Existing law establishes the Clean Transportation Program, administered by the Energy Commission, to provide funding to certain entities to develop and deploy innovative technologies that transform California's fuel and vehicle types to help attain the state's climate change policies. This bill would require a person who receives state funding to deploy a publicly available electric vehicle charging station to agree, as a condition of receiving the funding, to operate the station in compliance with reliability and reporting standards that would be developed by the Energy Commission, as specified. The bill would require the Energy Commission and the Public Utilities Commission to develop excluded time criteria from which the recipient of the state funding is exempt from reliability standards compliance. The bill would require the Energy Commission to publish data on compliance with the reliability standards as part of the above-described assessment and to protect the confidential information of an entity subject to the reliability standards by anonymizing and aggregating the compliance data in the assessment. The bill would also require the state board, upon appropriation by the Legislature, to develop a program, in consultation with the California Integrated Travel Project, to provide financial assistance to residents of low-income or disadvantaged communities, or both, to use electric vehicle charging stations, as specified. Existing constitutional provisions require that a statute that limits the right of access to the meetings of public bodies or the writings of public officials and agencies be adopted with findings demonstrating the interest protected by the limitation and the need for protecting that interest. This bill would make legislative findings to that effect.