Hyper Charging your Site Selection
A well-planned route is something you don’t have to think about. It delivers you from home to office and back without letting you worry about fuel. Range anxiety is probably the biggest shift in commute culture that needs to be addressed. With a shift in the consumer economy from ICE to a sustainable existence. Consumers are looking forward to owning a vehicle that is easy on the planet and won’t put you in a situation where you must solemnly drag the vehicle along the road while looking for the nearest charging station. This is where charger site selection, or to be more specifically hyper charger site selection comes into play.?
How we calculated site suitability of hyper chargers within a city?
Conducting a site suitability analysis solves the ultimate problem for EV businesses – Where do I place my hyper chargers? The output of the analysis gives us the best possible locations, understood as those where consumer traffic is higher, and where other business criteria are also met i.e., high-density locations, a connection of main roads and highways, ideal concentrations of sales, and most favorable routes. In this post, we talk about how we used spatial data analysis to surface the most viable locations for hyper charger site selection in multiple cities in India.?
How we approached the problem?
To approach site suitability within a city, the scores are derived through a weighted sum approach providing outputs of 1km-by-1km tiles that cover the entire city in a range that will allow us to select the most suitable sites. Here we considered 12 points of interest categories, whose point density was calculated per tile and multiplied by category weights. This score was then normalized and the procedure was used as a standardized approach that could be applied to any city. Along with this, a layer of road network traffic stats was applied and a pre-determined time limit to reach a hyper charger from any point in the city.??
Each city and town of interest was first mapped into 1sq km grids. The points of interest (POIs) in urban regions include various categories –??
How do we maximize coverage during site suitability analysis??
The next step in the solution is to find a set of prominent locations in the city under study, to provide maximum coverage. The shortlisted locations from the site suitability indices were considered for further analysis. The next criteria for shortlisting were to choose from a set of different combinations of network coverage based on the requirement of each city. The combinations that encompassed a maximum number of prominent consumer traffic spots were selected.??
An isochrone (shown below) – or a drive time map was created to understand the sample coverage of a city.?
Different requirements for different cities?
Understandably, each city has a different number of POIs under different categories, so a threshold was fixed, removing the outliers. The total number of POIs under each category was divided by the threshold, and the outliers were removed by normalizing the score.??
To arrive at the final score for each 1sq km grid the assigned weightage was multiplied by the result of the POIs divided by the threshold. The final tile score thus obtained could then be evaluated for physical and technical feasibility according to the requirements and capabilities of the vendors and parties involved.?
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A map of Delhi with calculated isochrones for hyper charger site selection
Isochrone map with POIs
When a hyper charger site location must be determined, it is good cognizance to add a layer of sales data. Figuring out the sales data locations with spatial operations on a sales point layer such as – point in polygon and nearest neighbor analysis as well as address string match was done. The output would allow us to determine an area where the sales were concentrated and factor that, into the site's suitability.??
The hyper charging vision for India
The final few factors to consider are visualization of travel routes from prominent cities to popular leisure destinations. The routes we used for analysis were derived from recommendations of the shortest and fastest routes between origin and destination. The output thus obtained was a vector layer of the road network that was added as a layer to our previous site suitability analysis.??
The final map of Delhi obtained showing red tiles as the areas most favorable for hyper charger placements considering all factors
Site suitability analysis doesn’t stop there. When required, it can be expanded to perform micro-planning to include an understanding of urban charging requirements that change with the tier and municipal capabilities of cities, and highway circuits.??
As we have seen in this post, spatial network analysis gives businesses the flexibility to explore network expansion opportunities based on valuable spatial insights. This approach takes the guesswork out of site selection decisions, so businesses can home in on those locations most likely to succeed.?
We are proud hunters and gatherers of the best talent, & this blog was written by our brilliant GIS Solution Manager Akshit Shah. The gif you saw above was made by our amazing Graphic Designer Sanika Date.