Modeling Battery Swapping Stations for sustainable urban mobility

With the road transportation alone being responsible of almost half the total oil demand over all sectors, electric vehicles (EVs) represent a promising solution to address sustainability concerns raised by urban mobility. However, a sustainable and pollution-free EV charging process cannot be enabled without an extensive penetration of Renewable Energy (RE) sources and a pervasive deployment of smart charging scheduling approaches. In a similar scenario, renewable powered Battery Swapping Stations (BSSs) can play a key role to enable sustainable and feasible electric mobility (e-mobility). Considering an on-grid BSS, additionally powered by photovoltaic panels, we analyze the proper dimensioning of its capacity in terms of number of sockets and the proper sizing of the RE supply to satisfy the battery swapping demand, trading off cost, Quality of Service (QoS) and feasibility constraints. We propose an analytical model to represent the BSS operation and limit the complexity of system investigation, exploring its potentiality to dimension the BSS system based on the actual battery swapping demand. Our findings highlight how integrating a local RE supply allows to considerably decrease cost by almost 40%. Furthermore, in the planning and deployment of BSS systems, the model results effective in finding good tradeoffs among QoS requirements, capital expenditures, and operational cost.