Increasing Electric Vehicle Charger Availability with a Mobile, Self-Contained Charging Station

As the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) keeps increasing in recent years, two prevailing concerns of owners are charging station availability and reliability. During busy travel times, such as holiday weekends or during the summertime, it is common for owners to report long charger wait times due to limited site size and offline stations. Most charge point operators (CPOs) only install four to six chargers at a station, which leads to low redundancy. This study proposed a new movable, self-contained charging station design. This charging station can be deployed with short notice to temporarily increase capacity during busy times or emergencies such as evacuations due to natural disasters. With the goal of being self-sufficient, this study weighed the pros and cons of differing cell chemistries, sized the battery using charging data provided by the United States’ largest public CPO, and discussed the feasibility of a solar canopy.