Andy HarrisSERC recently finished a study applying our agent-based Plug-in Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (PEVI) model to the city of Delhi, India. Partnering with Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL), we were able to combine our model with an advanced vehicle performance model to make recommendations for siting electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure in Delhi.
While we have used the PEV model previously for northern California, applying the model to Delhi brought new challenges. We had to abandon many of the assumptions underlying our earlier California models – for example, we could no longer assume that every driver had access to a charger at home.
It comes as no surprise that the results of our Delhi study differed from our California studies. Whereas the California results favor medium- to high-power Level 2 and DC Fast chargers, the Delhi results heavily favor Level 1 chargers, which charge at half the rate as Level 2 chargers. Our base scenario recommendations are shown below. These include 1,671 chargers at a price of $1.6 M; of these, 1,550 were Level 1 chargers, representing approximately half of the overall cost. The map of Delhi shows the distribution of different power chargers throughout the city.
In addition to the above recommendations, our analysis revealed several key lessons to help with future planning:
- Access to home charging alone is not enough to get drivers everywhere they need to go.
- Battery-swapping stations, despite their refill speed, are too expensive to be a cost-effective solution for Delhi.
- Heavy congestion makes EVs impractical for many drivers, particularly when air-conditioning is used in the vehicle.
With India’s National Electric Mobility Mission Plan targeting 400,000 EVs nationwide by 2020, the next five years promise many lessons for supporting drivers through strategic siting of chargers.
