Business Model for Subscription Service for Electric Vehicles Including Battery Swapping, for San Francisco Bay Area, California

Abstract

A proposed strategy for facilitating the introduction of electric-drive vehicles calls for vehicle purchasers to own the vehicle but to lease the battery from a third party to help reduce the first-cost hurdle to consumers. A further extension of this concept for all-battery electric vehicles (EVs) would include the ability for consumers to exchange their discharged batteries for charged ones at battery swap stations. This factor would extend the driving range for EV service subscribers but with increased costs to build and operate the stations. This analysis centers around a base-case scenario from 2012 to 2027 that includes a set of assumptions about subscriber membership levels, gasoline and electricity prices, corporate level expenditures, and the capital costs of batteries, charging stations, and battery swap stations. The base-case set of assumptions is then systematically varied, and a few combinations are explored to determine whether and how such a service might be economically viable. Key sensitivities include buildup of the number of subscribers, the price of gasoline, capital costs of the batteries, distribution of total annual driving mileage of subscribers, and the number of corporate employees needed to operate and manage the subscription service business. Focusing on a network in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, the analysis suggests that, with current gasoline prices and the base-case scenario assumptions, the economics of this business model are challenging.

Optimal Operation and Services Scheduling for an Electric Vehicle Battery Swapping Station

“…The batteries energy state-of-charge and energy state-of-charge shortage are constrained by maximum and minimum battery capacities in constraints (8) and (9). The energy state-of-charge ceiling is below the nominal value in order to avoid the risk of setting the battery on fire, and the minimum avoids rapid degradation of the battery, as explained in [25].…”

“…The business aspect of the BSS has also been the subject of research. The idea of a subscription pricing structure, along with the required infrastructure cost, is presented in [9]. The associated risks, classification of investments, and potential services that could be sold by the BSS are investigated in [10].…”

The optimal design and cost implications of electric vehicle taxi systems

“…We assume costs for an ICEV of $20,000, $25,000 for a HEV, and $35,000 for a PHEV and a BEV. 7 For a battery switch station, the fixed capital cost we assume is $500,000 (Lidicker et al, 2011) and the variable capital cost per port is $250,000, and for a DCFC station the fixed cost is $50,000 (Schroeder and Traber, 2012) and the variable cost per port is $25,000. For an AC Level 2 station, which is assumed to be used by a PHEV, the capital cost is $5000.…”

QoS guaranteed online management of battery swapping station under dynamic energy pricing

“…When a new EV comes and the battery is swapped at time t, the sets K(t, j), J(t, k), and D j (t) are updated. D t is the charging demand for j at time t.The battery coordinator first maps batteries to the target SOC and sets the charging deadlines by solving charging levels in (4). Then, the new charging schedules will be decided by the BSS battery charging scheduler solving (5).…”

“…A new business model of building a network of fast battery swapping station (BSS) has been proposed to address this challenge and is supported by major EV manufacturers such as Tesla [2], Mitsubishi [3], and so on. In a BSS, depleted or partially depleted batteries can be easily replaced by fully or partially charged batteries [4, 5]. Drivers only need to wait for a short period of time for dismounting and loading batteries.…”