Charging strategies for economic operations of electric vehicles in commercial applications

Abstract

When substituting conventional with electric vehicles (EV) a high annual mileage is desirable from an environmental as well as an economic perspective. However, there are still significant technological limitations that need to be taken into consideration. This study presents and discusses five different charging strategies for two mobility applications executed during an early stage long-term field test from 2013 to 2015 in Germany, which main objective was to increase the utilization within the existing technological restrictions. During the field test seven EV drove more than 450,000 km. For four out of five presented charging strategies the inclusion of DC fast charging is indispensable. Based on the empirical evidence five key performance indicators (KPI) are developed. These indicators give recommendations to economically deploy EV in commercial fleets. The results demonstrate that the more predictable the underlying mobility demand and the more technical information is available the better the charging strategies can be defined. Furthermore, the results indicate that a prudent mix of conventional and DC fast charging allows a high annual mileage while at the same time limiting avoidable harmful effects on the battery.

Route Optimization of Electric Vehicle considering Soft Time Windows and Two Ways of Power Replenishment

“…Constraint (17) indicates that the remaining power to node j is equal to the remaining power to leave node i minus the power consumed on the way. Constraint (18) indicates that the state of charge of electric vehicles is nonnegative at any position. Constraint (19) indicates that the decision variable is constrained to 0-1.…”

“…At present, fast charging is the most common charging strategy. Schucking et al proposed five charging strategies and believed that DC fast charging is essential [18]. In addition to fast charging on the issue of charging strategy, battery switching is also a relatively popular charging strategy.…”

Two-stage stochastic program optimizing the cost of electric vehicles in commercial fleets

“…Therefore, in the opinion of the authors, commercial applications, in which mobility is an essential part of the service, should not be dependent on the accessibility of public charging stations. Hence, the vehicle is only available for charging when parking on company grounds (the binary charging parameter Exemplary recorded curves can be found in Schücking et al [51] or Landau et al [52].…”

Walking on sunshine: Pairing electric vehicles with solar energy for sustainable informal public transport in Uganda

“…However, electric vehicle proponents counter-argue that, on a macro-scale, these vehicles' impact in terms of CO 2 emissions depends mainly on the charging strategy and that the emissions can be reduced by optimising the use of renewable energy sources such as solar power (Schücking et al, 2017;Buresh et al, 2020). In one of the scarce and isolated publications on electric vehicles in sub-Saharan Africa, Buresh et al (2020) note that South Africa (like many countries in the region) has high levels of insolation (the measure of solar energy at a place over a specified time), from between 4.5 and 6.5 kWh/m 2 per day, with annual sunshine averaging more than 2500 hours.…”