Evaluating the Role of Behaviour and Social Class in Electric Vehicle Adoption and Charging Demands

Abstract

Understanding electric vehicle (EV) adoption rates and charging patterns is critical in enabling grid operators to maintain quality of supply and offers the potential to procure network services and avoid or postpone capital investments. Agent based models have separately been shown to be useful in modelling EV adoption, policy options, behavioural influences and grid impacts. In this work, we bring together these threads with real world travel data to present a behaviour-based EV adoption and use model able to replicate historical changes in vehicle fleets and match the most recent real world EV charging profile data. We have shown how our model can be used to simulate the impact of policies and consumer behaviour on the rate of EV adoption across socio-economic groups and the locational grid impacts of EV charging, and as such we believe it to be of value to policy makers, grid operators and demand response aggregators.

Keywords: Electric vehicles, Consumer behaviour, Charging Profiles, Network Demands