What is the future of public charging infrastructure for electric vehicles? – A techno-economic assessment of public charging points for Germany

摘要

Electric vehicles are able to reduce local and global emissionsfrom the transport sector and thereby could help to slow downglobal warming if they achieved significant market shares. Asall other vehicles, they need a charging or refuelling infrastructureto be built up simultaneously to vehicle market penetration.With the current disability to store energy for longdistance trips in batteries, the need for a dense charging infrastructureappears to be even higher. On the other hand, manycar users could charge at home in their private garages. Thequestion therefore is whether domestic charging infrastructureis sufficient to trigger market penetration of electric vehicles.Or in other words: Do we need public charging infrastructurefor a mass market diffusion of electric vehicles and if so, howmuch? Here we discuss technical and economic aspects of thisquestion. Large data sets of German driving profiles are analysedto estimate the share of vehicles that could technically beoperated as electric vehicles. In addition, the driving behaviouris combined with a simple market diffusion model for electricvehicles and their corresponding charging infrastructure whereeach user is assumed to choose the fuel option with the lowesttotal costs of ownership. We can thereby quantify the share ofvehicles that can be replaced by electric vehicles and estimatethe market diffusion of public charging points. We find that thistechnical and economic analysis does not justify a large developmentof public charging infrastructure which is confirmedby empirical user behaviour data in pilot projects where notmore than 10 % of all electricity for driving is charged publicly.