Economic assessment of strategies to deploy publicly accessible charging infrastructure

From the end user perspective, the main barriers for widespread electric vehicle (EV) adoption are high purchase cost and range anxiety, both regarding battery capacity and availability of accessible EV charging infrastructure. Governments and public bodies in general are taking steps towards overcoming these barriers by, among others, setting up regulatory requirements regarding standardisation, customer information and recommending objectives of publicly accessible charging infrastructure. However, the economic performance of publicly accessible charging infrastructure is unknown and any deployment plan should be backed up by a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, to check the efficiency of the plan in economic terms. This paper presents the results of the economic assessment performed within the FP7 EU-funded Green eMotion project, where relevant conclusions for helping industry strategic approach and decision makers have been taken.