UTILIZED SOFTWARE 

OpenPaths Emme

LOCATION 

Brazil

ORGANIZATION/COMPANY 

TTC

In southern Brazil, the question was not whether electric vehicles would arrive, but whether the region would be ready for them. Across 94 microregions, planners faced a puzzle with too many unknowns: how quickly drivers would switch to electric, where they would need to recharge on long highway journeys, and what all of that new demand would do to a power grid operated by three separate utilities. Traditional, static planning tools simply could not carry a network of that scale or reconcile data that heterogeneous.

Working on behalf of the Interamerican Development Bank, TTC Engenharia de Tráfego e de Transportes turned to Bentley OpenPaths Emme to build a macro-scale simulation of the regional highway network. The model tested demand horizons for 2030 and 2040, traced realistic battery ranges of 220 and 290 kilometers against actual travel paths, and revealed exactly where drivers would run short of charge. From that evidence emerged a precise answer: thirty fast-charging stations, rated between 50 and 100 kilowatts, sited where they would do the most good.

The result is a BRL 52.9 million investment plan that stands on its own economics — a 24% internal rate of return and BRL 290 million in net present value for power distributors — while delivering environmental returns that are larger still. By enabling the replacement of 10.9% of the light vehicle fleet, the network displaces 2.7 million tons of CO₂ emissions each year, amplified by a remarkably clean grid footprint of just 0.09 tCO₂ per megawatt-hour. Cleaner air in urban centers follows, as particulate emissions fall alongside carbon.

What began as a modeling exercise became a data-driven roadmap: a shared, spatially grounded plan that three utilities and a region could act on together.