Location of charging stations for electric vehicles

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The transportation sector is responsible for roughly 25% of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Canada. Electric vehicles (EV) are part of a portfolio of environmental solutions, suggesting a way to curtail GHG emissions produced by road transportation, significantly reduce inter-city air pollution, and decrease our dependence on fossil fuels. The willingness of customers to purchase EV is widely dependent on the widespread availability of chargers. Hydro-Québec, a public utility that manages the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in Québec, is actively involved in transportation electrification, most notably by developing a network of public fast-charging stations designed to complement stations at home and at work. Currently, there are 1,786 public charging stations in Québec that support more than 40,000 EV. Given the relatively low cost and widespread availability of electricity in Québec, EV have been identified by the government of Québec as a critical means to reduce GHG emissions in the province. In particular, the government aims to increase the number of electric vehicles in Québec to about 500,000 by 2027. This goal can only be achieved if a significant number of public charging stations are deployed across the territory. This project pursues and significantly extends an ongoing fruitful collaboration between Hydro-Québec and researchers from Université de Montréal and Polytechnique Montréal. As part of this collaboration, an optimization model was developed that addresses the location of new charging stations, so that the demand share of EV is maximized over a long-term planning horizon. Although this model already provides solutions that take into account most realistic constraints, it is based on simplifying assumptions on the demand: it is assumed to be deterministic, a single class of users is considered, and the adoption of EV depends solely on the location and number of public charging stations. In addition, the relationship between the adoption of EV and the deployment of public charging stations is derived mostly from data sources from other countries, rather than from local data sources. The objective of this NSERC CRD project is to address these limitations.