Quo Vadis Smart Charging? A Literature Review and Expert Survey on Technical Potentials and User Acceptance of Smart Charging Systems

Uncontrolled charging of plug-in Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) represents a challenge for the energy system. As a solution, recent studies propose smart charging to avoid grid congestion and to integrate renewable energy. While financial benefits for smart charging schemes are currently quite low, there are other objectives for smart charging. However, it is unclear for which objectives smart charging can be used most effectively and which arguments are most likely to convince end users of BEVs to use smart charging schemes. To fill this gap, we conducted a literature review of the premises and the objectives of smart charging and how they fit the end-user’s motivation to use such smart charging systems. To evaluate the results, we present findings of 16 domain experts who evaluated various statements on smart charging according to their technical correctness and their persuasiveness towards end users. The results show that experts consider those smart charging objectives as most persuasive towards end users which they consider technically correct. Moreover, cost savings and integration of renewable energies are rated highest on both scales. On the contrary, experts do not expect a positive impact of smart charging systems on battery life and rate it as not very convincing.