Athena ZEV: Identifying Strategies for Airport Electrification (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video Athena ZEV: Identifying Strategies for Airport Electrification.

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>>Lori Clark, Air Quality and Clean Cities Manager, North Central Texas Council of Governments: Airports can be challenging to electrify because they already are such huge consumers of energy. Adding additional electric capacity to serve an even higher load can be difficult.

>>Greg Scott, Executive Board Member, American Rental Car Association: I'm afraid we're behind the curve, though. We need to catch up quickly.

>>Clark: A lot of the operational requirements of an airport are kind of what I call non-negotiable. Everything has to operate as perfectly as possible, 100% of the time.

>>Monte Lunacek, Athena ZEV Principal Investigator, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: The goal of the Athena ZEV project is to identify technology that the airports can use to electrify the different areas of the airport moving forward. And to make sure that we estimate the amount of energy they'll need, so they can plan ahead to get that capacity.

>>Craig Smith, Director of Product, Overair (EVTOL): Aviation is really that hardest market to solve. It's the most energy intense, it's the most weight critical. But what Athena is doing is they're trying to take this problem and make it publicly available in a way to where you can quickly kind of analyze the problem, solution, and get past that first step of understanding what your needs are.

>>Alycia Gilde, National Manager for ZEV Partnerships and Engagement, U.S. Department of Energy: How can we create tools and resources to really help industry make that transition? And more importantly, how can we do it at an airport and create a program that's truly replicable across the country?

>>Daniel Hammer, Senior Partnerships for Airports, Uber: I think this project is significant because it's bringing a lot of different stakeholders into the room that might not engage on a daily, monthly, even annual basis. And so having all of those voices represented throughout the project allows for collaboration on a level that you usually don't see with one specific airport project.

>>Michael Berube, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Sustainable Transportation and Fuels, U.S. Department of Energy Transportation Decarbonization Priorities: You have rental cars that are here, you have the airport equipment itself, you have a lot of truck fleets, you know, your Amazon, UPS, FedEx, people like that operate in and around airports as well. So industry partners, stakeholders, local government, utilities, they are all critical people to not only help us develop solutions, but then, they have to be solutions that they can really implement at the of the day.

>>Robert Horton, Vice President of Environmental Affairs and Sustainability, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport: We learn so much about the benefits of modeling our complex operations and the benefits that we can achieve through that type of approach. As we looked at electrification opportunities more broadly, we recognize that we have to have a much more coordinated effort.

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>>Sarah Ziomek, Sustainability Project Manager, Dallas Fort-Worth International Airport: We're concerned and focused not just on the environmental impacts of our operations, but making sure that our sustainability initiatives are economically viable and make business sense.

>>Berube: This is a much bigger than just one facility. It's a way to really take one project, but create a learning that can be spread across the country.

>>Gilde: We really think that this is a project that not only supports DFW in all of its stakeholders that are looking to electrify, but how it can be a model to support airports around the U.S. and around the world.

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[Text on screen: Learn more about the Athena ZEV Project by visiting www.nrel.gov/athena.]