Framtiden för snabbladdning och marknadsaktörerna inom eMobilitys syn på laddinfrastruktur

Sammanfattning: The electric vehicle market has potential to contribute to Sweden’s national goal to have a fossil fuel independent transport sector by 2030. However, the market answers to a lot of challenges making it difficult for the market to fully reach its potential. The volume of electric vehicles has seen a steady increase during the last year (2012), although many of these vehicles are mostly for PR purposes or bought by the public sector that wants to lead by example. Still, barriers in the form of high purchase costs, an anxiety for the limited battery capacity and the lack of standardisation are some of the problems that the market is struggling to solve. Today it is expensive to invest in fast chargers, making it hard for the commercial agents to make investments. Also, the difficulty to find a profitable business model that enables the agents to retain the investment by charging the customer for the electricity makes it even harder. Therefore, the commercial agents claim not to be able to do this until the market grows bigger, but the potential electric car owners hesitate due to the lack of infrastructure. In this sense the market answers to a catch 22; in order to make the prices decrease a higher volume is needed, but to reach a higher volume infrastructure is required. This project, which was conducted in collaboration with ABB, origins from this problem and explored how the infrastructure would help to create a market for electrical vehicles, both regarding commercial car fleets and private car owners. The questions at issue therefore regarded which agents that would have an interest for charging infrastructure and how they look at the potential of electrical vehicles and what strategies they have. To be able to answer these questions a market survey with 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted. After analysing the material a tendency concerning fast charging could be identified, as the agents had a shattered opinion about the need for these. Many agents thought that they were unnecessary, as most car owners travel less than forty kilometres per day, a distance which can be covered by an over-night charge. Hence, a number of additional questions were added to the project concerning the need for fast chargers and if necessary, how many that would be needed. However, this also depends on what kind of scenario that is sought, as the number of chargers for a private car owner scenario differs from a scenario where taxi fleets will be able to run on electricity. Which agents that were interested in infrastructure for electrical vehicles, as operators or owners, could be identified with the help of the market survey and with support from ABB. To answer the questions added after the market survey, a model was constructed using Poisson distribution. This aimed to calculate the amount of fast charging poles that would be needed given the different scenarios and with a 90 % probability that the pole would be free to use. A tool was also constructed to be able to calculate the amount of charging poles that would be demanded along highways, depending on the traffic. This aimed to be a tool for decision makers when planning infrastructure in between cities and along highways.   The result from the model was a wide range of number of charging poles, depending on the scenario and the amount of charging opportunities provided by one pole. However, many of the parameters used in the model were also hard to predict, mainly due to lack of statistics, meaning that the sensitivity of the result is rather profound. The conclusion was that the market is in an introductory phase, since major challenges of standardisation and security remain. Also, market agents have no direct strategy for the charging infrastructure. Because of the small size of the market and the fact that the market is only in an introductory phase, commercial agents on the market will not be able to invest in fast charging infrastructure on their own. Hence, they will wait until a large enough market demands this before investigating this possibility again. This means that the marked either has to evolve with the help of slow charging, a development that will be slower than if fast chargers were present to solve the problem with the battery capacity anxiety. Without the investment from tax-funded activities the market will not be able to electrify commercial vehicle fleets in the near future. Weather or not the public sector should invest depends on how they value the benefits of this market in comparison to other projects and on the market and time horizon that is being pursued.