The Impact of Range Anxiety and Home, Workplace, and Public Charging Infrastructure on Simulated Battery Electric Vehicle Lifetime Utility

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) offer the potential to reduce both oil imports and greenhouse gas emissions, but have a limited utility due to factors including driver range anxiety and access to charging infrastructure. In this paper we apply NREL's Battery Lifetime Analysis and Simulation Tool for Vehicles (BLAST-V) to examine the sensitivity of BEV utility to range anxiety and different charging infrastructure scenarios, including variable time schedules, power levels, and locations (home, work, and public installations). We find that the effects of range anxiety can be significant, but are reduced with access to additional charging infrastructure. We also find that (1) increasing home charging power above that provided by a common 15 A, 120 V circuit offers little added utility, (2) workplace charging offers significant utility benefits to select high mileage commuters, and (3) broadly available public charging can bring many lower mileage drivers to near-100% utility while strongly increasing the achieved miles of high mileage drivers.