EV charging habits and their impact on public charging infrastructure usage

Many cities worldwide are developing public Charging Infrastructure (CI) to promote Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption. A critical factor in these efforts is understanding the charging patterns of EV drivers, which is often neglected by existing studies. We use a large-scale dataset of charging events in Brussels to simulate the effect of different charging patterns on 3 KPIs: network utilization, energy consumption, and user convenience (i.e. failed connection attempts). Our findings suggest that EV drivers with habitual charging patterns are important contributors to the overall energy consumption and utilization rate; however, they also cause more charging inconvenience. Moreover, charging inconvenience is found to be spatially concentrated in certain areas, and unequally distributed over different user groups. Policy makers can use these results either to adapt the roll-out of public CI to the observed charging behavior, or to actively steer charging behavior to achieve a more efficient use of the existing CI.