Charging options for electric vehicles in urban areas


This project aims at identifying all possible urban charging options for privately owned electric vehicles.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have experience a great uptake in the past years from early adopters. Those early adopters are mostly individuals that benefit from a private parking place where they can plug their car for night charging. For EVs to move beyond early adoption and become mainstream, a solution need to be found that enables cars parked in the street to charge. In other words, mass adoption of EVs will only happen if urban charging is solved.

Although widely discussed, no convincing solution emerges yet for urban charging. Many options are being assessed, but all of them seem to suffer barriers that would greatly hamper their deployment potential.

The objective of this project is to identify all possible urban charging options for private electric vehicles in a 2030 horizon and to carry out a preliminary assessment of their feasibility from a technical, regulatory and socio-economic point of view. In this sense, the objective is not to come up with a unique solution to the urban charging problem, but rather to provide expert insights into which solutions might be worth investigating further.

This eight-month project is carried out by the EPFL Energy Center, in partnership with the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris.

Principal investigator François Vuille
Partner EHESS
Period 2017-2018
Laboratory CEN
Collaboration TRACE