Abstract:

Public charging infrastructure is crucial for the market penetration of BEV in general and, in particular, for the individual user's decision to purchase a BEV. In this paper, a new methodological approach was developed. It aims to predict the allocation of BEV charging based on a framework considering demographic data and simple decision rules. The availability of charging infrastructure forms the basis for the enforced market penetration of electric cars. This paper aims to examine the distribution of the allocation of future charges to the various types of charging stations in order to provide a starting point for the evaluation of the need for charging infrastructure, i.e. its number, design and cost-effectiveness. For the case study of Austria, a new approach to derive the allocation of charging processes is applied by using demographic variables and decision rules. As a result, it is found that 88% of the charges are conducted when the user is at home, which is in line with literature. Significantly, fewer charges, approx. 8.8%, are carried out at the workplace. It is a relevant finding of this work relativizing the importance of workplace charging. Only 1.7% is conducted at ‘public charging infrastructure’ and 1.5% is conducted at ‘fast charging infrastructure’ (i.e. motorways). It is observed that ‘public charging infrastructure’ is only used for a small proportion of the charges. In conclusion, it can be deduced that some ‘public’ or fast charging stations are unable to recover their costs through charging processes but are subject to other business models. Although public and fast charging stations contribute a lot to BEV market penetration, these low results show that it is likely that many of these stations will hardly be profitable.