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Does your EV charging infrastructure plan only need to support 350 high mileage vehicles?

We clearly need a better EV charging infrastructure than we have right now, but what’s more important – the “more” or the “who”?

Different types of EV drivers will be better serviced by different EV chargers, so understanding who needs what is the critical question. Our recent work suggests that the gaps between these different driver types are far greater than previously thought, making this “who” question even more important.

Forecasting is perilous, especially when we’re looking at new technology that the mainstream hasn’t worked out yet.

Broadly speaking, dependence on the public charging network is driven by whether drivers can park off-street, and how far they drive.

If a household has space to park their vehicle off-street, they’ll probably install their own EV charger and only use the public network on longer trips. If they don’t have access to a drive, they’ll have to use public chargers to top up their batteries.

People who drive more will need to charge their vehicles more frequently. Clearly what’s classed as high mileage is an open question but, for this example, we used over 15,000 miles per year (around 289 miles per week ). If an EV has a range of 200 miles, then this means charging 2-3 times a week to be secure, creating a dependency on nearby, available, and low-cost charging.

People who drive the UK average of 5,200 miles per year (around 100 miles per week) will only need to charge once a fortnight with a 200-mile range EV. This then opens up a myriad of different destination charging options. For example, supermarkets, retail parks, gyms, EV forecourts and hubs, and cinemas. At least one of these is likely to be visited during that fortnight.

Let’s use an example area to explore the distribution of these different drivers. Will we have a significant population of high mileage EVs hammering the network? Or, will there be a smaller number of vehicles that would benefit from a more focussed approach?

If we look at the Harrogate Postcode Area as a typical example, and apply our current understanding of adoption and usage, then by 2030 we should see 29,309 all electric cars and vans resident in the area.

However, only 351 EVs will be covering more than 15,000 miles a year (289 miles per week) and be dependent on frequent use of the public charging network (charging 2-3 times a week). The other 28,958 cars and vans will be either charging off-street via private chargers or use a wider range of charging options.

So the question is, do our plans for infrastructure development reflect such a divergent set of local user needs?

EV DRIVER ARCHETYPES IN HARROGATE

We can use our on-street/off-street and high/normal milers archetypes with MOT data to get a better understanding of potential charging demand in Harrogate.

We don’t have data on a house-by-house basis to understand the on/off-street ratios as the MOT data is not provided at that level. So, we’ve made the assumption that the on/off-street ratio is evenly applied across the fleet. Clearly there are challenges either way here. High mileage vans tend to be associated to higher ratios of on-street households but high mileage large cars tend to be associated to lower ratios of on-street households.

Equally off-street households are currently adopting EVs faster than on-streets suggesting that the load associated to high mileage on-street households is overstated in these examples. However, we don’t have hard data on this difference and have not included this factor in these examples.

Using the National Grid’s Future Energy Scenarios Consumer Transformation curve to predict EV adoption, we can work out the potential number of electric vehicles in Harrogate for 2030 and 2050.

This suggests that these drivers could potentially be best managed on a focussed individual case basis. This would have two key benefits;

• It would provide assurance to businesses that their drivers and vehicles will be able to transition to EVs
• It will ensure that the associated chargers have high utilisation.

The other stand-out data point is how many of the on-street EVs will need only occasional charging (96%). This opens a much broader range of options for an authority to follow. Yes, these vehicles do “rest” most nights near the owner’s homes, but they also usually “rest” for prolonged periods of time at predictable locations that might be easier to wire up like supermarkets.

There’s lots to unpick here, but fortunately our expert Alistair Gonoude has worked with over 80 different councils to answer these questions and has seen the whole range of different approaches to these challenges.