A model for estimating the energy demand of the EV charging stations in an urban area

The transport sector has an important impact on the total greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. In accordance with the future targets of the European Commission, electric vehicles are one of the possible solutions that would help to reduce the impact of the transport sector on total emissions. There are several ways to foster the spread of electric vehicles, like incentives for purchases, subsidies for charging infrastructure installations, etc. For the latter, factors like the availability of parking spaces, the location of existing charging stations (CSs), the density of electric vehicle (EV) ownership, and information about the drivers (i.e., travel destination and the charging patterns) have to be considered. Geographic Information System (GIS) can help utilities to identify potential areas to host such infrastructures and analyze their impact on the network. This paper proposes a methodology to localize the EV charging infrastructures and characterize them by a spatial distribution of the expected energy demand. The results are heatmaps based on the magnitude of the estimated energy demand in defined points of interest that are the most frequent destinations of EV drivers. The approach is applied to the urban area of Cagliari in Italy to demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained graphical results.