Economics of Battery Swapping for Electric Vehicles—Simulation-Based Analysis

Abstract

As electric vehicles have become increasingly popular in recent years, battery swapping technology has been promoted as an alternative to the time-consuming battery charging process. Nevertheless, battery swapping is held back by the trade-off between the additional battery investment and the short service time for users. In this paper, we developed simulation models to analyze the economics of battery swapping systems. In particular, we collected real data from eight battery swapping stations Guangzhou, China for the analysis. The results show that the service levels of the stations are reduced significantly as the number of users increases. On the other hand, economies of scale exists when implementing the battery swapping system. As the number of users increases, to maintain the same level of service level, the cost of the batteries shared by each user decreases. The analysis also suggests that, given the scale of potential users for an area, the marginal utility of increasing the number of stations will diminish. Finally, to maximize the utility and economic return of the service, we identified that there is a trade-off between the number of stations and the amount of batteries equipped in each station.