Results of the Accompanying Research of the ‘Modellregionen Elektromobilität’ in Germany for Charging Infrastructure

Abstract

It has been the German approach so far to not promote electromobility by direct subsidies but to organise large research projects, which should enable electromobility on Germany’s way to a technological leader in this field. A part of this is the ‘Modellregionen Elektromobilität’ programme, which is funded since 2009 by the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI). The main focus is to make electromobility visible in everyday life, therefore funding fleets and testing a bunch of solutions for different fields in electromobility on the street. Since there are a lot of different projects in the eight regions, an accompanying research programme merges the results and thus can be seen as a multiplier. In the field of infrastructure, there is a lot of ongoing research. A research topic from the programme was the access, billing and technical requirements for the electric infrastructure. In addition, there is a big question the accompanying research addresses. The issue is, how to build up additional infrastructure on a demand-based basis, since it is still hard for manufacturers and service companies to find a business case—and it remains uncertain how much infrastructure will be needed in the future. This article provides some theoretical and practical rudiments based on the report of the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI 2014a) to answer this, which are also tested in the shown demonstration projects. Generally spoken, the results are in consistency with other big funded programmes in Germany like first results of the Schaufenster-programme (BMVI 2014b) or the Fraunhofer Systemforschung (FhG).