Low-Carbon Charging Facilities Planning for Electric Vehicles Based on a Novel Travel Route Choice Model

Promotion of charging facilities (CFs) can ameliorate range anxiety and facilitate long-distance travel by electric vehicles (EVs). In this context, a multistage low-carbon EV CFs planning model is proposed in this paper for the coupled transportation and power systems. This model not only takes into account the construction costs of newly-built CFs and their adverse impacts on the distribution system, but also considers the carbon emissions of CFs and the penalty due to the inconvenience for EVs to be recharged. In addition, a rational travel route choice model is significantly important to accurately evaluate the service capability of CFs to be constructed and thereby to obtain an optimal CF planning result. Therefore, a novel travel route choice model developed in this work allows EV drivers to take detours according to the CF locations to charge their EVs multiple times and then finish their trips. Carbon emission flow (CEF) model is innovatively employed to precisely calculate CFs’ carbon emission amount from the perspective of consumption side. Subsequently, uncertainties involved in CF planning, i.e., distribution and growth rate of traffic flow and electric load, popularity of different types of EVs, as well as location of the connected node of clean electricity, are fully considered to obtain a robust CF planning scheme that can achieve a good performance in the current stage and exhibit robustness for the uncertainties in the future stage. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. The impacts of future carbon price and EV cruising range on the planning results are also comprehensively evaluated.