On September 30, 2008, the US Department of Energy (DoE), issued a cooperative agreement award, DE-FC26-08NT01914, to the Metropolitan Energy Center (MEC), for a project known as ?Kansas Consortium Plug-in Hybrid Medium Duty Certification? project. The cooperative agreement was awarded pursuant to H15915 in reference to H. R. 2764 Congressionally Directed Projects. The original agreement provided funding for The Consortium to implement the established project objectives as follows: (1) to understand the current state of the development of a test protocol for PHEV configurations
(2) to work with industry stakeholders to recommend a medium duty vehicle test protocol
(3) to utilize the Phase 1 Eaton PHEV F550 Chassis or other appropriate PHEV configurations to conduct emissions testing
(4) and to make an industry PHEV certification test protocol recommendation for medium duty trucks. Subsequent amendments to the initial agreement were made, the most significant being a revised Scope of Project Objectives (SOPO) that did not address actual field data since it was not available as originally expected. This project was mated by DOE with a parallel project award given to the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) in California. The SCAQMD project involved designing, building and testing of five medium duty plug-in hybrid electric trucks. SCAQMD had contracted with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to manage the project. EPRI provided the required match to the federal grant funds to both the SCAQMD project and the Kansas Consortium project. The rational for linking the two projects was that the data derived from the SCAQMD project could be used to validate the protocols developed by the Kansas Consortium team. At the same time, the consortium team would be a useful resource to SCAQMD in designating their test procedures for emissions and operating parameters and determining vehicle mileage. The years between award of the cooperative agreements and their completion were problematic for the US and world economies. This resulted in the President and Congress implementing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, abbreviated ARRA (Pub.L. 111-5), commonly referred to as the Stimulus or The Recovery Act. The stimulus money available for transportation projects encouraged the SCAQMD to seek additional funds. In August of 2009, they eventually were awarded an additional $45.5 M, and the scope of their project was expanded to 378 vehicles. However, as a consequence of the stimulus money and the inundation of DOE with applications for new project under the ARRA, the expected time table for producing and testing vehicles was significantly delayed. As a result, these vehicles were not available for validating the protocols developed by the Kansas Consortium. Therefore, in April of 2011, the Scope of Project Objectives (SOPO) for the project was revised, and limited to producing the draft protocol for PHEV certification as its deliverable.