Why don’t we all travel in electric cars anymore?

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Even if the autonomy of the vehicles, the number of charging stations and the charging speed were increased sufficiently, there would still be another problem: overloading of the electricity grid.

According to data from the Transport and Logistics Observatory in Spain (OTLE), 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions in Spain are caused by the road transport of internal combustion engine vehicles, more than emissions from industrial activity (20.8%), agriculture ( 14%). and electricity generation (11.8%). For this reason, decarbonising transport is one of the priority actions in sustainability strategies.

Electrification would consist of evolving into vehicles powered by electric motors. This transition should be simple and smooth. However, it is quite the opposite: sparse, complex and very slow.

The reasons are the barriers to change created by the comparison with combustion engine vehicles, which we have lived with for over a hundred years. In terms of the vehicle user, there are three fundamental barriers:

1. The autonomy of the vehicle,

2. The speed of the charging process,

3. The availability of points to carry out the recharge.

The price of the vehicle is also an important barrier from an economic point of view. Finally, in terms of energy, the possibility of overloading the electrical system could be an issue to consider.

The 100% electric vehicle currently does not deliver the same performance as its combustion equivalent. It does not have the same autonomy, although it has been improved in this regard.

Electric models have an autonomy of 150-400 km, incomparable with current petrol and diesel models. To increase autonomy, a battery with a capacity to store between 50 and 90 kWh of energy is needed. This also means an increase in the cost of the vehicle.

The charging process currently available is usually slow, although fast and super-fast charging is already possible in vehicles. The charging points would often be located in the so-called electrolineras.

All this brings us to the last barrier: the current deployment of charging points is insufficient. The reality is that there are fewer than 15,000 charging points in Spain today, while there should be around 100,000 by 2023.

In economic terms, the electric vehicle is still more expensive than comparable combustion engine vehicles. However, this difference could be partially corrected if the total costs over the entire service life and the fuel savings are analyzed.

Finally, in the field of energy, the electrification of transport is an issue when the process is scaled up. Currently, plans to include electric vehicles are those included in the PNIEC (National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan). One of these is the goal of putting five million electric vehicles into circulation. With that number of vehicles, the electricity grid can be maintained without any problems, as the demand will not be great, but it does not represent a real process of electrification of a fleet of 27 million combustion cars.

If user barriers were removed, offered great autonomy, fast charging at a gas station and at any time, the electric vehicle could become popular at the sales level. This would lead to a much more uncertain situation from the point of view of grid stability.

Currently, the network supports a perfectly defined and controlled demand that the system can anticipate and display graphically (green line in the graph following this paragraph). It can be seen how this line overlaps with the real demand curve (yellow line) and also that the maximum power demanded by the system on any given day is about 31,000 MW.

The electrification of transport initially focused on slow or semi-fast charging modes (between 3.7 kW and 22 kW) and during nighttime periods, between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m., when demand is lower. The green curve would rise during that period of the day, but the system would be manageable.

However, in a fast charging process, each vehicle will be connected to a charging point with a power between 50 kW and 400 kW for the time it takes to recharge its large battery. If vehicle charging were usually fast and random, the green curve would be much more complex to predict and the system would no longer be manageable.

Let’s see with a numerical example. Let’s imagine an almost fully electrified transport with a fleet of 25 million vehicles that can charge with 100 kW, and assume that 2% of these vehicles are charging simultaneously. The peak demand could reach 50,000 MW, which would be added to the already existing demand. The same vehicles, but with slow charging, would require 3.7 kW each and the possible peak demand would be 1850 MW.

The Spanish electricity grid has the capacity to supply electricity to businesses, services and citizens at all times. It is called installed capacity and is in the order of 115,000 MW. As can be seen, if we increase the percentage of vehicles (from 2 to 4%) or the charging rate (from 100 kW to 200 kW), the numbers skyrocket and the possible peak demand can even exceed installed power.

With all this, it can be seen that the complexity and the existing certainties make the process of electrification of road transport very difficult, which seems to be far from taking place today.

The electric vehicle should be deployed and take its rightful place, although its function should not be to massively replace the combustion vehicle. We may be waiting for the development of the hydrogen car for an intermediate step. Nevertheless, in order to ensure the sustainability of transport, we must not only adopt alternative energy sources, but also gradually reduce the current dependence on private cars and make greater and better use of shared vehicles, public transport, bicycles and the new initiatives that are undoubtedly Is yet to come.

This article was published inThe conversation

Source: La Verdad

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