Renewable powered Battery Swapping Stations for sustainable urban mobility

Due to sustainability concerns raised by the transportation sector, still relying mostly on oil as main energy source, urban mobility is quickly shifting towards the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), The EV charging process should heavily rely on Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and be smartly scheduled to promote sustainability and pollution reduction. In this context, renewable powered Battery Swapping Stations (BSS) represent a promising solution to enable sustainable and feasible e-mobility. Focusing on a BSS powered by photovoltaic panels, we investigate the issue of properly dimensioning its capacity (in terms of number of sockets) and the renewable energy supply to satisfy the battery swapping demand, trading off cost, Quality of Service and feasibility constraints. In addition, we analyse the potential benefits of smart scheduling strategies for battery recharging. Our results show that considerable cost saving of up to almost 40% can be achieved with a local RE supply to power the BSS. Furthermore, a proper tuning of the scheduling strategy configuration parameters is required to better trade off cost and Quality of Service, based on the desired performance targets.

I. Introduction

Currently the main energy source for the transportation sec-tor is still represented by oil, satisfying more than 90% of the sector energy demand. According to [1], road transportation alone is responsible of the largest oil consumption among all sectors, with a share of almost 50%. Furthermore, whereas in other sectors oil consumption has not been significantly increasing in the past decades, the total final oil consumption of road transportation has almost triplicated in less than five decades, currently amounting to almost 2000 Mtoe per year [1], a trend which is clearly not sustainable.