Electric Vehicle Charging Behaviour and Price Elasticities of Charging: An Analysis Using Swiss Data

As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Doina Radulescu, University of Bern.

Abstract of discussed Paper

In this paper I scrutinize charging behaviour of electric vehicles using data from a Swiss public charging station provider. I find a prevalence of idle charging especially among alternative current (AC) stations, where mean idle charging amounts to almost 1h. The average delivered power during charging sessions is considerably lower than the port’s rated power level, with a share ranging between 24% for some AC stations to 66% for some DC stations. The low annual amount of electricity charged per customer (on average 357 kWh in 2021) translates into only 2,340 km driven. I compute charging tariff elasticities using panel data methods and information on around 1,550 public charging stations located all over Switzerland and around 77,000 charging events for the time period 2019 to February 2022.

Controlling for a number of station attributes such as the plug type, the power of the plug as well as for location, year- month-day and individual fixed effects, the findings reveal that a 10% increase in prices per kWh reduces electricity demand per charging event by up to 4.6% depending on the sample used. Some operators also demand a tariff per minute after one hour onwards, which allows me to exploit the nonlinear tariff structure and perform a bunching analysis with respect to the duration of charging. The obtained elasticities can be used to compute optimal tariffs per minute that internalize idle charging behaviour.