Clean Transport

Published on October 6th, 2015 | by James Ayre

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EV Charging Doesn’t Need To Be Everywhere, Just In “Hot Spots”

October 6th, 2015 by James Ayre 

Originally published on EV Obsession.

Widespread public electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure isn’t necessary in order to spur widespread adoption. Rather, charging infrastructure can be concentrated at “hot spots” (and homes + workplaces), according to a new report from Idaho National Laboratory.

That finding (and others) from the report is going to be used to further refine various activities of the US Department of Energy’s EV Everywhere Grand Challenge, amongst other things.

These new findings are the result of what is essentially the largest, most comprehensive look into EV charging patterns.

Phys.org provides more:

Widespread adoption of PEVs has the potential to significantly reduce our nation’s transportation petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. A commonly cited barrier to adoption is the lack of public places for PEV drivers to plug in their vehicles. To reduce this barrier, critical questions must first be answered: How many and what kind of charging stations are needed? Where and how often do PEV drivers charge? How many electric vehicle miles are traveled and what level of petroleum reduction can be achieved?

In 2009, DOE set out to answer these critical questions. Several resulting projects — ChargePoint America project, Chrysler Ram PEV Demonstration, General Motors Volt Demonstration, South Coast Air Quality Management District/Via Motors PHEV Demonstration, and The EV Project — installed roughly 17,000 charging stations and deployed approximately 8,700 PEVs across the US. The DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy provided half the funding for the five projects, and INL researchers collected and analyzed the resulting data.

Data collected from all five projects captured nearly 130 million miles of driving and 6 million charging events, providing the most comprehensive view of PEV and charging usage to date.

Amongst the other notable findings:

• EV owners perform, on average, more than 85% of charging at home.
• While traveling away from their house, EV owners tend to focus on only a few specific, regular charging stations (workplace charging stations in particular).
• EV owners tend to vary charging habits based on station fees + rules.
• “Project participants with access to charging at work were observed to drive 25% more on electricity alone than the overall group of vehicles in the project.”

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Tags: Chargepoint America, DOE, EV Everywhere, EV Everywhere Grand Challenge, Idaho National Laboratory

About the Author

James Ayre James Ayre's background is predominantly in geopolitics and history, but he has an obsessive interest in pretty much everything. After an early life spent in the Imperial Free City of Dortmund, James followed the river Ruhr to Cofbuokheim, where he attended the University of Astnide. And where he also briefly considered entering the coal mining business. He currently writes for a living, on a broad variety of subjects, ranging from science, to politics, to military history, to renewable energy.

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