Bloomberg NEF’s Future of Mobility Summit, held this week, was an opportunity for Edison International to showcase its commitment to facilitating and accelerating the electrification of the transportation sector, including talking about its electric utility’s recent white paper, Reimagining the Grid — a sweeping assessment of how the grid must change to support California’s climate goals through transportation electrification.

Particularly germane to summit panel discussions was Southern California Edison’s analysis of how the power grid will need to evolve to accommodate the large-scale adoption of electric vehicles and helping customers achieve their electrification goals.

“Reimagining the Grid looks at the future state in 2045 and beyond, and all the clean energy transformation that we think we need to achieve, and what that means in terms of technology development and forward planning,” said Mike Backstrom, SCE managing director of Energy and Environmental Policy, during a session on public charging infrastructure.

Backstrom said if grid planning and development is done in a responsible way that maintains affordable energy costs, consumers will end up in a better economic position while less of their expenses go toward paying for fossil fuels and more toward clean electric power.

Edison International was a sponsor of the Future of Mobility Summit, which was attended this year by more than 600 mobility leaders from government, business, academia and media from around the world. Normally held in San Francisco, the summit was virtual this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The summit also provided a forum for SCE to discuss the practical ways it is helping to accelerate EV adoption in its service area by adding EV charging infrastructure across all vehicle classes through its Charge Ready programs.

“Our greatest impact is going to be on how we are helping customers meet their fleet electrification goals,” Jill Anderson, SCE senior vice president of Customer Service, told attendees at a session on overcoming barriers to fleet decarbonization. “We’re implementing one of the largest medium- and heavy-duty transportation electrification programs in the United States to build EV charging infrastructure.”

The $356 million Charge Ready Transport program, launched last year, provides financial and technical assistance to commercial SCE customers navigating the process of installing EV charging infrastructure at their businesses. The program will add charging stations at a minimum of 870 commercial sites, or enough infrastructure to support at least 8,490 industrial EVs.

Later this year, SCE will also be launching Charge Ready 2, a significant expansion of passenger EV charging. The $436 million program will help commercial customers add 38,000 additional chargers for passenger EVs at workplaces, multifamily dwellings, public parking lots, schools, hospitals and destination centers. It will build on the pilot phase of the program, which has already added more than 2,700 charging stations at 144 sites in SCE’s service area.

“At Edison, we realize we are playing just one role in what is a whole systemic change that’s coming about,” Drew Murphy, Edison International senior vice president of Strategy and Corporate Development, said during closing remarks on the first day of the summit. “Our role at SCE is to make sure our system can handle all these EVs as they arrive and as they start using the grid as their fueling source. And I think we’re well positioned to do that.”

Murphy added that transformation of the grid needs to happen in a way that’s equitable and sustainable for everyone. “We have to make sure we move away from this being something that only people with a lot of money and access to technology and wealth can do, but can actually be adopted by everyone in the U.S. and across the globe.”