Facilitating the uptake of Electric Vehicles in rural communities

With increasing concerns arising over the impact of Climate Change, multiple countries, including the UK have set ambitious targets to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, in particular CO2 emissions. Electric Vehicles (EVs) have been recognised as a positive contributor towards these goals, including various other environmental, social, and governmental policies. For these reasons, we are amid a large-scale socio-techno transition; from conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to EVs. Substantial work has been conducted for this transition in relation to an urban setting, however, little has been done for rural communities. This thesis addresses the EV transition for rural areas by exploring their feasibility, capabilities, and the impact for both these communities and grid operators.
This thesis presents a novel Travel Demand Model to simulate private passenger vehicle usage for rural communities. Based on statistics for a real-world location, the temporal-spatial travel patterns for a population of rural vehicles is achieved. Building upon the Travel Demand Model, a novel EV Charging Model has been developed to understand the energy consumptions should these travel patterns be completed by EVs. Through repeating the results of the Travel Demand Model, energy consumptions for the fleet of EVs was calculated for a month long simulation period, longer than many of the past EV charging models in literature. The EV Charging Model also scheduled regular charging events, focusing on home charging only. Multiple recharging scenarios were investigated, varying parameters such as household electricity tariffs and charging behaviour.
With the energy and power demands for a rural EV population understood, these results were combined with real-world grid data from National Grid (formerly known as Western Power Distribution). A thorough investigation into the impact on grid supply demand due to EV uptake in rural areas is presented, including analysis of potential grid overload events, planned and unplanned power cuts and the utilisation of Demand Side Management techniques to mitigate the issues which arise.
Finally, this thesis presents the findings from an online survey which was developed and distributed to rural communities within the Peak District, UK. This work was done firstly to engage with the rural community, an often overlooked stakeholder in large-scale socio-techno transitions, as well as provide validation to the aforementioned models presented in this thesis.
The research presented in this thesis seeks to fill multiple gaps found in literature pertaining to the EV transition in rural areas, as well as providing a better understanding for the nuances faced by these communities. Furthermore, this thesis identifies potential avenues for further work to build upon the findings of this thesis, to only improve and ensure that rural communities are not left behind in this EV transition.