Electric vehicle battery swapping station: Business case and optimization model

In order to increase the adoption rate of electric vehicles, they need to appeal to customers as much as their fossil fuel equivalents. However, major concerns include long battery charging times and range anxiety. These concerns can be mitigated if customers have access to battery swapping stations, where they can meet their motion energy requirements by swapping batteries for charged ones, in as much time as it takes to fill the gasoline reservoir of a conventional vehicle. Besides benefiting the customers, the battery swapping station is beneficial to the power system because it emulates an energy storage station capable of participating in electricity markets. In this station, the batteries can be scheduled to charge in grid-to-battery mode, inject power to the grid in battery-to-grid mode, and transfer energy between batteries in battery-to-battery mode, if there are economic advantages in doing so. This paper discusses how these various modes can be optimized and the results translated into a business case for battery swapping stations.