Resilience of urban public electric vehicle charging infrastructure to flooding

An adequate charging infrastructure is key to enabling high personal electric vehicle (EV) adoption rates. However, urban flooding-whose frequency and intensity are increasing due to climate change-may be an impediment. Here, we study how geographically-correlated outages due to floods impact public EV charging networks in Greater London. While we find no appreciable impact on the ability of battery EVs to serve typical urban driving behaviors, we observe disproportionate stresses on chargers both near, and surprisingly significantly farther from, the flooded regions. For instance, we find over 50% increase in charger utilization and 260% increase in the distance to the nearest available charger in parts of Greater London over 10 km away. Concerningly, the impact is most concentrated on already-stressed sections of the network, underscoring the infrastructure's vulnerability. Finally, we develop and evaluate four strategies for city planners to enhance the flood resilience of cities' public EV charging networks. A study of how the Greater London electric vehicle charging network is affected by flooding reveals disproportionate impacts on already-stressed parts of the network, peaking as far as over 10 km away from the flooded regions.

Automated summary

A study on the Greater London electric vehicle charging network reveals disproportionate impacts of flooding on the already-stressed parts of the network, even up to 10 km away from the flood regions. This highlights the vulnerability of the charging infrastructure. Additionally, the study proposes four strategies to enhance the flood resilience of cities' public EV charging networks.