Economics of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure in a Campus Setting

In this work, we search for the lowest-Net Present Cost (NPC) charging infrastructure plan for a university campus. The campus expects an ongoing shift towards EVs and wants to supply zero-carbon electricity for EVs as a way to manage the emissions of vehicles coming to campus. We study what infrastructure the university would want to build and when, given factors like project economy of scale (suggesting larger projects) and cost declines in most technologies over time (suggesting delaying deployment). Results suggest that the economic balance between these factors calls for large expansion projects with 5-15 years in between, with each new expansion of a larger scale than the previous one, and a tendency to delay projects to reduce NPC. While this analysis was focused on a university campus, the same challenges apply to cities or nations converting to EV fleets and suggests that “lumpy” infrastructure additions may be a logical response to continual adoption to EVs.