Electrification of transport is a topic that is gaining momentum all over the world, still mostly in developed countries, at an accelerating pace. This is about replacing the internal combustion engine that has been responsible for moving vehicles in the last century, with an electric motor that uses the electrochemical energy stored inside a battery to do the same thing instead.
Electric vehicles’ uptake forecasts being published every year show that conventional vehicles with internal combustion engines may become images of the past in as little as 30 years. But what about all the electric energy required to get this growing fleet of electric vehicles moving? The transport sector needs to get interestingly close to the energy sector going forward. These two sectors have traditionally been completely distinct. Conventional vehicles needed to fill up their tanks with gas found in gas stations, while the energy sector had to only worry about producing and transferring electricity for keeping our lights and appliances on across the world. This is now changing, since all the energy required to charge up the batteries of electric vehicles needs to be provided through charge points installed at all various locations always connected to the electricity grid.
This may sound simple, but it is not. Charging an electric vehicle at someone’s home almost doubles the amount of energy consumed compared to running just the normal household appliances. Charging a vehicle rapidly, which means filling up its battery to 80% of capacity in as little as 20 minutes, requires as much energy as a block of apartments would normally consume. Imagine a future with 1 or more in every 3 vehicles being electric, and we can probably suspect how much additional demand we are expecting the electricity grid to cope with.
We need the two sectors to converge in order for mobility assets and energy systems to help each other. With the use of smart technologies, such as smart charging and vehicle to grid (V2G), electric vehicles can be used as decentralized energy resources and become in effect “batteries on wheels”. It is important to understand that the electricity grid, even in its current form, has got the ability to deliver the energy required overall to charge electric vehicles. The problem creeps in when we wish to deliver this energy to charge the vehicles at the same time when all other assets are connected to the grid draw power. This would cause issues to the grid and as a big trial that ran in the UK showed, it would require huge investments in order to upgrade current infrastructure.
This is why technologies like smart charging are of vital importance if we want to sustainably transition to a clean transport sector without re-building the entire electricity grid infrastructure. Smart charging is about incentivizing electric vehicle drivers to change their charging patterns in order to help the electricity grid in managing better demand. This in effect means that instead of plugging in your electric vehicle when you get back home from work and charging immediately, charging must be postponed to night when there is plenty of available capacity in the grid to serve the additional demand. As a result, the grid infrastructure is utilized most efficiently while the vehicle is fully charged the next day to cover the driving needs of its owner.
As these technologies are being implemented, the energy sector needs to start paving a clear path toward a cleaner and more decentralized system. The above will only be possible if all relevant stakeholders work very closely to create the innovative solutions required to solve the complex problems arising from the revolution currently taking place in transport and energy sectors. Having a high penetration of renewable sources in the energy production mix is the only way to get to a point we have a truly clean transport sector in the future.
