What benefits do commercial vehicles have for battery swapping infrastructure?
The popularity of Electric Vehicles is on rise, which can be attributed to the global increase in cost of gasoline, coupled with the stringent governmental policies regarding the global warming and carbon emissions. More and more people in the developed regions like America, Europe, Chinese metropolitans are starting to prefer the EVs over conventional gasoline-powered vehicles because of their environmental friendliness; and this trend has soared from passenger vehicles to the corporate and commercial vehicles too.
Electric vehicles seem to be an ultimate solution to counter against global warming resulting from transportation, which accounts for nearly 29% of global greenhouse gas emissions (US EPA); however, there are some deterrents too. There is a bottleneck in charging infrastructure of electric vehicles, which is inconvenience caused by longer charging times that makes consumers in buying EVs for commercial transportation over long-haul applications.
Battery Swapping as an alternative refueling option. Battery Swapping refers to the quick recovery of the vehicle’s electrical energy by replacing the batteries when they are near to running out. Under this model, the EV owners only the vehicle and batteries can be rented out from the service operators, thus significantly reducing the issues waiting at charging stations for longer periods of time and also depreciating the cost of the electric vehicles. Tesla, the American EV manufacturing giant has also launched a pilot project for replacing the EVs and developing such battery swapping stations (Schneider et al.).
The battery swapping system is rapidly gaining popularity in China which is the largest consumer of Electric Heavy Duty Trucks (HDT). The BAIC group of China indicated it has widespread plans to promote the construction of battery swapping stations in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions; and is vigorously acting on the plan since 2015. The Figure shows a schematic for a battery swapping architecture followed by the comparison of battery swapping and battery charging techniques as follows:
The battery swapping infrastructure for commercial vehicles has the following advantages:
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The batteries account for nearly 40% cost for the EV commercial vehicles, so by removing the need to purchase the batteries will significantly reduce initial costs to purchase the vehicle.
The batteries that the drives rent, will be property of charging/swapping station company.
Rapid replenishment of energy i.e., about 3-5 mins, so there is minimal hindrance/delay in operations of the commercial vehicle due to battery drainage.
This can be game-changer for the corporate vehicle, municipality vehicles by reducing the costs and enhancing the pace of electric vehicles
It helps in reducing the sudden spike in load on power grid during peak hours. The batteries can be charged all the time in a unified way, putting constant load on the grid.
The batteries can be swapped with the vehicles (at a threshold) and no change in load occurs during the peak hours.
Although, the initiatives taken by many companies to develop battery swapping infrastructure have not been successfully accomplished, but the research and development on the concept is still underway. Literature on the topic indicates that it is the huge initial capital investments involved that is hindering the development of battery swapping stations; the costs of expensive EV batteries also add up to the capital investments.
However, researchers, manufactures and industrialists are again now focusing on developing such a system because the annual global sales of commercial and passenger vehicle are ever high of all times. So, more wealthy countries in the Nordic region, Europe, US and China see the feasibility of developing battery swapping infrastructure for commercial vehicles in order to cut down carbon emissions and meet environmental protection goals.
It is important to note that the concept and application for Battery Swapping based heavy duty trucks which are mostly used for commercial purposes has just started, therefore there are limited researches on operating economy of such vehicles and most studies are done on business analysis model. A study by Yunfei et al. indicates that the battery swapping based commercial trucks can save up to US$ 10,870 per annum in comparison to the diesel-powered commercial trucks; the savings has been calculated by figuring out the fuel-electricity price differences in China. Furthermore, Hewu et al. conducted study based on analysis of battery swapping with reference to the conventional charging mechanism for taxis, which can used as a reference for determining the economies of the battery swapping heavy commercial vehicles too.
Some companies in Sweden have already launched battery swapping infrastructures for electric vehicles (mainly personal use vehicles), but there are bright prospects of optimizing the infrastructure for extending the utility for light and medium sized commercial vehicles (i.e., taxis, food trucks, light courier deliver trucks and garbage collection trucks etc.).
As mentioned before, registration of new electric vehicles is rapidly increasing, which also increases the need public charging stations. As today, Sweden do not have enough charging station if we compare that the sales of electric vehicles increased 106 % in 2021 while number of charging stations only increased by 23 % according to a rapport made by Power Circle.
In February 2022 there was approx. 2650 charging stations with total of approx. 14 300 charging points in Sweden, according an article written by Dagens Nyheter. In 2030, Power Circle estimates that we would need 90 000 charging points to fulfill the needs of all the electric vehicles in traffic, which would need that we would need to build more than 10 000 new charging points per year. Even if new stations are planned, the infrastructural change is too slow.
Today in Sweden, there is in average 20 vehicles per charging points, and throughout the country while the EU goal for reasonable quota would be 10 vehicles per charging points.
Not to even mention, that charging takes time, which leads queues – and that leads to increased overall travel time for electric vehicles. Battery swapping be an faster complement for the traditional charging stations.
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