Toward Sustainable Transportation: Accelerating Vehicle Electrification with Dynamic Charging Deployment

TL;DR

This paper proposes a traffic-based deployment strategy for dynamic wireless charging roads to enhance EV range and adoption, demonstrated through case studies in New York City and Xi'an, showing significant range extension with minimal infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel traffic-based deployment framework for dynamic charging infrastructure, validated with real-world traffic data from two major cities.

Findings

Dynamic charging extends EV driving range in urban areas.

Equipping 5% of roads with wireless chargers can nearly maintain EV battery levels.

Increasing charging roads to 10% improves EV range by approximately 10%.

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) are being actively adopted as a solution to sustainable transportation. However, a bottleneck remains with charging, where two of the main problems are the long charging time and the range anxiety of EV drivers. In this research, we investigate the deployment of dynamic charging systems, i.e., electrified roads that wirelessly charge EVs on the go, with a view to accelerating EVs adoption rate. We propose a traffic-based deployment strategy, statistically quantify its impact, and apply the strategy to two case studies of real traffic in New York City (USA) and Xi'an (China). We find that our analytical estimates not only closely match the real data, but they also suggest that dynamic charging considerably extends the driving range of popular EV models in urban mobility. For example, when only 5% of the existing roads in New York City are equipped with this technology, an EV model such as the Nissan Leaf will approximately maintain its battery level without stopping to recharge. If the percentage of charging roads is increased to 10%, then the Leaf will gain nearly 10% of its battery after every 40 kilometers of driving. Our framework provides a solution to public and private organizations that support and facilitate vehicle electrification through charging infrastructure.