Charging Infrastructure Planning for Intercity Multimodal Electric Mobility in Rwanda

Join on Zoom Stream on YouTube Eleftheria KontouAssistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Harrington Faculty Fellow, Energy Institute, The University of Texas at Austin Speaker Biography:Dr. Kontou is an assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a 2026-2027 Harrington Faculty Fellow with the Energy Institute at UT Austin. Her research focuses on planning sustainable transportation systems and understanding their interdependencies with energy systems and the environment. She earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from University of Florida, and holds a M.Sc. from Virginia Tech, and a Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens in the same field. She was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kontou has received an NSF CAREER award and the Council of University Transportation Centers-Cambridge Systematics New Faculty award. She is an Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Faculty Scholar, a US Frontiers and a US-Africa Frontiers of Engineering invited participant, and a Levenick Sustainability Teaching Fellow. She serves as an associate editor of the Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment journal. Abstract:Transport electrification in developing countries faces challenges due to limited grid capacity and unreliable electricity supply; to support electric travel, It is important to consider how charging infrastructure should be distributed across different modes and regions. In this talk, I will go through our planning process for intercity, electric, passenger and bus charging infrastructure in Rwanda using a mathematical programming framework that jointly allocates charging stations and grid upgrades on the national network while accounting for outages, public transport priority, and spatial equity. Under a fixed budget, planning for r...