Charging Point Infrastructure - The catalyst for the electrification of the Norwegian car fleet

Abstract: To lower gas emissions, vehicle fleet electrification is desirable for countries with a low greenhouse emission energy mix. This study focuses on whether charging infrastructure is of importance for consumers' electric vehicle (EV) purchase decision. We test this by using EV data from Norway, one of the leading EV markets globally to date, where charging infrastructure's impact on the demand of EVs is investigated in an environment with already strong monetary incentives in place. A regional approach where all households face the same national monetary incentives allows for isolating the effect of regional infrastructure and other factors such as income, environmental awareness and traffic volumes on EV registrations. The panel data (2007M1-2013M12) from the Norwegian governmental transport administration (Opplysningsrådet for Veitrafikken) is used in a fixed effects model specification. To our knowledge, no study investigating charging infrastructure for EV markets has ever been conducted in a panel dataset setting, most likely due to data restrictions. Findings show that charging infrastructure is significant for households' vehicle purchasing decision where one additional charging point per regional square kilometre gives an increase of between 15 to 21 additional EVs per 10,000 households. Governmental intervention is necessary for fleet electrification and optimal policy for EV substitution of the conventional car fleet can only be designed when fully understanding the combined effect of subsidy, infrastructural and utilization policies.