Infrastructure Estimation for a Freight/Personal Transport Operation with an Electric Boat on the Magdalena River

Abstract

Nowadays, electric mobility is an attractive alternative to the traditional internal combustion mobility. Electric mobility presents benefits in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and noise pollution. This mobility has been studied in the context of urban areas as they usually have better connections to the power grid; however, it is necessary to study the implementation of electric mobility in the context of rural areas as well. In this way, we introduce a study performed on a river route in a region of Colombia. This route consists of a round trip between Magangué and Pinillos, two municipalities on the banks of the Magdalena river. The study aims to determine the necessary infrastructure to perform the operation with an electric boat (EB). This infrastructure is defined as the location and sizing of Photovoltaic-assisted Charging Stations (PVCSs) and the EB battery capacity. For finding the infrastructure, we propose a constructive heuristic. After running this heuristic, we found a feasible solution. In this solution, one PVCS is installed with an energy storage system of 46 kWh and an area of 29 m of photovoltaic modules. The battery capacity for the EB was 207 kWh.