Community and Social Media Use among Early PEV Drivers

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are now being offered for sale to consumers. Contemporaneously, multi-way social interactions among individuals, groups, businesses, governments, and other actors are increasingly facilitated by communication technologies: we take this to be “social media.” Can this confluence facilitate the formation of new interest-based communities among plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) buyers? How might this be important to promoting PEVs? This paper presents the results of 28 in-depth interviews with household PEV drivers in San Diego, California. These PEV drivers show wide variation in their descriptions of who they believe PEV drivers to be, conceptualizations of a PEV, uses of social media to engage other members of the community, and socially mediated and face-to-face interactions with other PEV drivers. Better understanding of the relationship between emerging PEV markets, social media and consumer-based communities will affect the ongoing management of transitions to electric-mobility

The Earth BioGenome Project 2020: Starting the clock

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The Earth BioGenome Project 2020: Starting the clock.

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Lewin, H. A., Richards, S., Lieberman Aiden, E., Allende, M. L., Archibald, J. M., Bálint, M., Barker, K. B., Baumgartner, B., Belov, K., Bertorelle, G., Blaxter, Mark L., Cai, J., Caperello, N. D., Carlson, K., Castilla-Rubio, J. C., Chaw, S-M., Chen, L., Childers, A. K., Coddington, J. A., Conde, D. A., Corominas, M., Crandall, K. A., Crawford, A. J., DiPalma, F., Durbin, R., Ebenezer, T. E., Edwards, S. V., Fedrigo, O., Flicek, P., Formenti, G., Gibbs, R. A., Gilbert, M. Thomas P., Goldstein, M. M., Graves, J. M., Greely, H. T., Grigoriev, I. V., Hackett, K. J., Hall, N., Haussler, D., Helgen, K. M., Hogg, C. J., Isobe, S., Jakobsen, K. S., Janke, A., Jarvis, E. D., Johnson, W. E., Jones, S. J. M., Karlsson, E. K., Kersey, P. J., Kim, J-H., Kress, W. J., Kuraku, S., Lawniczak, M. K. N., Leebens-Mack, J. H., Li, X., Lindblad-Toh, K., Liu, X., Lopez, J. V., Marques-Bonet, T., Mazard, S., Mazet, J. A. K., Mazzoni, C. J., Myers, E. W., O’Neill, R. J., Paez, S., Park, H., Robinson, G. E., Roquet, C., Ryder, O. A., Sabir, J. S. M., Shaffer, H. B., Shank, T. M., Sherkow, J. S., Soltis, P. S., Tang, B., Tedersoo, L., Uliano-Silva, M., Wang, K., Wei, X., Wetzer, R., Wilson, J. L., Xu, X., Yang, H., Yoder, A. D., Zhang, G. The Earth BioGenome Project 2020: starting the clock. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(4), (2022): e2115635118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115635118.November 2020 marked 2 y since the launch of the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), which aims to sequence all known eukaryotic species in a 10-y timeframe. Since then, significant progress has been made across all aspects of the EBP roadmap, as outlined in the 2018 article describing the project’s goals, strategies, and challenges (1). The launch phase has ended and the clock has started on reaching the EBP’s major milestones. This Special Feature explores the many facets of the EBP, including a review of progress, a description of major scientific goals, exemplar projects, ethical legal and social issues, and applications of biodiversity genomics. In this Introduction, we summarize the current status of the EBP, held virtually October 5 to 9, 2020, including recent updates through February 2021. References to the nine Perspective articles included in this Special Feature are cited to guide the reader toward deeper understanding of the goals and challenges facing the EBP

Are We Hardwiring Gender Differences into the Plug-in Electric Vehicle Market?

Evidence from the early market for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) indicates fewer were being purchased (or leased) by women than would be expected based on women’s participation in all new vehicle transactions. The ratio of male-to-female applicants for California’s Clean Vehicle Rebate (CVR) averaged approximately three males for every female from early 2011 to mid-2015; the ratio for all new vehicle transactions is approximately one-to-one. Research on early PEV owners indicated that for their many similarities, females and males talked about their PEVs in ways that suggest female PEV drivers’ experiences may carry less influence to shape the future of PEVs and charging infrastructure than males’. First, there were simply fewer female PEV owners to provide feedback. Second, females were more likely than males to talk about how they adapted to the present capabilities of PEVs while male respondents were more likely to talk about PEVs in terms of testing their limits. For example, female PEV drivers were more likely to talk about how they used the available charging infrastructure; male respondents were more likely to point to where and how to extend infrastructure. This study extends the analysis from early PEV buyers to the population of new-car buyers (of whom the vast majority own gasoline powered internal combustion engine and hybrid electric vehicles (ICEVs and HEVs)) in California. The results presented here are based on data from an on-line survey of new-car buyers in California conducted at the end of 2014 and subsequent inhome interviews with a subset of survey respondents in early 2015. The overall conclusion is that among new-car buyers, female and male respondents share similar distributions of interest in the next new vehicle for their household being a PEV or fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV). For no electric-drive vehicle type did the male-to-female ratio approach that seen in the actual early market for PEVs. Under conditions that most closely correspond to the availability of incentives at the time of the survey, 22% of males and 21% of females express an interest in a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) (a ratio of 1.05 males for every female) and 12% of males and 10% of females express an interest in a battery electric vehicle (BEV) (ratio of 1.20). The difference is greater for FCEVs for which the ratio is 1.76 males for every female.View the NCST Project Webpag

Potential Consumer Response to Electricity Demand Response Mechanisms: Early Plug-in Electric Vehicle Drivers in San Diego, California

This report summarizes findings of household interviews and focus groups conducted with plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) drivers on the effects of demand response management (DRM) strategies on the time of day of PEV charging. The research was conducted in the spring and fall of 2012 with PEV drivers in San Diego County, CA. The DRM strategies were of three basic types. First, electricity pricing included intentional and carefully designed time-of-use (TOU) price signals as part of a household PEV customer rate experiment by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), as well as uncontrolled implicit TOU signals resulting from differences between home and away-from-home prices of electricity. Home and away-from-home charging had independent price structures—including an initial period lasting several months during which much of the away-from-home charging was free. Second, technology, in this case timers onboard PEVs and in the electric vehicle service equipment (EVSE), i.e., the “chargers” were available to support PEV drivers adherence to a chosen time to start vehicle charging. Third was exhortation—often implicit or indirectly tied to PEVs—about the private and social benefits of shifting electricity demand to off-peak periods. It is not possible to entirely disentangle the effects of the individual DRM strategies. The aggregate effect is a widely told story by our respondents of their goal to maximize the amount of their PEV charging done during the “super off-peak” period from midnight to 5am. Given the qualitative research reported here, this stated behavior should be corroborated with quantitative measures of vehicle charging when they are reported at the end of SDG&E’s TOU rate experiment. Our PEV drivers reveal different comparative standards for whether any electricity price is perceived to be “high” or “low.” Their behavior, in aggregate, suggests the effect of TOU prices may be more like an off-on switch than the continuous change implied by the most common measure of such prices, i.e., own-price elasticity of electricity. This may be because TOU prices convey both a private price signal and a public exhortation to heed a social narrative about the susceptibility of the electrical grid to service interruption during periods of peak demand. PEV drivers with home photovoltaic systems are the most likely to say they charge their PEV at their convenience throughout the day—despite also being on a TOU rate—because of the mistaken belief that their PV system insulates the grid from their vehicle charging. A series of questions is posed about the generlizability and longevity of these findings, in particular as additional PEVs and PEV buyers enter the market