A rollout strategy for electric vehicle charging stations in urban European environments: Ensuring long-term sustainability

The electrification of the transportation sector is a key component of the global transition to green energy. As European countries increasingly adopt Electric Vehicles (EVs), they are in the process of rapidly deploying EV Charging Stations (CSs) to meet ever-increasing demand. However, the current approach to CS deployment is highly reactive and typically requires a manual case-by-case response from city planners. This reactive strategy stems from a lack of tools to provide a full understanding of the situation and the consequences of different rollout strategies. There are two key questions concerning the long-term sustainability of the current approach: (i) how certain can we be that decisions currently being made regarding CS placement will not eventually lead to detrimental strain on the electricity grid and (ii) what financial savings are possible by adopting an integrated approach to CS deployment which simultaneously considers both the demand for CSs as well as their impact on the grid. In this paper we investigate how to deploy CSs while mitigating electricity grid congestion and maximizing the utilization of valuable resources. We introduce a decision support algorithm for optimal CS placement within European low-voltage networks. The computational results for large-scale urban instances demonstrate that an integrated rollout strategy results in significant cost savings and reduces grid congestion. By comparing our integrated approach against the current strategy adopted by city planners, we provide valuable insights concerning how to avoid foreseeable problems and achieve cost-effective, future-proof CS infrastructure deployment.