Feasibility of Large-Scale Electric Vehicle Deployment in Islanded Grids: The Canary Islands Case

The present integration of electric vehicles into everyday life has the potential to redefine current standards of urban mobility. However, the territorial impact of this deployment demands a multiscale effort to ensure both efficient and sustainable performance; this is even more necessary in a disconnected system like an island. This article addresses the possibility of transforming the existing fossil-fuel-based infrastructure within Europe’s outermost regions into an electric vehicle charging network, with particular emphasis on the Canary Islands’ strategic plans. Using official datasets from Red Eléctrica de España (REE), IDAE, and the Canary Islands’ Energy Transition Plan (PTECan), we develop three scenarios (2025 baseline, 2030, and 2040) to quantify the additional electricity demand, peak load requirements, charging infrastructure needs, and associated greenhouse gas emissions. The methodology combines EV fleet projections, the driving patterns of residents and tourists, and vehicle efficiency data to estimate yearly electricity demand and hourly charging loads. The carbon intensity profiles of each island’s grid are used to calculate well-to-wheel emissions of EVs, benchmarked against internal combustion engine vehicles. The results indicate that achieving 250,000 EVs by 2030 would increase electricity demand by 1.1–1.4 TWh/year (+8–12% of current consumption), requiring approximately 25,000–30,000 public charging points. EV emissions range from 90 to 150 gCO2/km depending on charging time, compared to 160–190 gCO2/km for ICE vehicles. Smart charging and vehicle-to-grid integration could mitigate 15–25% of peak load increases, reducing the curtailment of renewables and deferring grid investments. A comparative analysis with Zealand highlights policy synergies and differences in insular versus continental grids. The findings confirm that large-scale EV adoption in the Canary Islands is technically feasible, but quite difficult, as it requires the deep, coordinated planning of renewable expansion, storage, and a charging infrastructure. BEV WTW advantages become unequivocal once the average grid carbon intensity falls below ≈0.8–0.9 tCO2/MWh, underscoring the primacy of accelerated renewable build-out and demand-side flexibility. Despite uncertainties in adoption and technology trajectories, the approach is transparent and reproducible with official datasets, providing a transferable planning tool for other islanded systems and mainland Europe. The proposed method demonstrates its usefulness in direct linking electrification scenarios with the real capacity of the electricity system, allowing the identification of very critical integration thresholds and guiding evidence-based planning decisions.