The future’s electric, but just how close are we to mass adoption?

- Jos Siemons, Managing Consultant Smart Energy

Almost every week a car manufacturer launches a new electric car. A recent automobile show in Frankfurt even dedicated a whole hall to the non-fuel based vehicles and yet sales of electric cars are sluggish at best in the passenger car market.

At present road transport depends on oil – more than 99 per cent of vehicles are currently powered by petrol or diesel. If we couldn’t travel by road, our lives would disintegrate. We couldn’t deliver goods, get to work, see friends, go to events and entertainments. Some people believe that we have about 50 years of oil left. Others think that oil production has peaked and we’re already on the fast track to empty. It’s clear something has got to change.

The European Union is investing in this area. Many of Europe’s electric vehicle projects are supported by the European Union itself with electromobility featuring in the Green Car Initiative that has been included in the European Economic Recovery Plan. Around €50 million has been set aside by the Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport for electric vehicles and related infrastructure.

So what is stopping us going out and buying the latest ecofriendly car? Perhaps it’s the fact that we, as consumers, are not yet confident that this is a product that will take off? The fact is that developing the car is the easy part, creating the infrastructure that surrounds it far trickier. As it stands, the current electricity infrastructure in Europe could not cope with electric vehicles – the load would be too great. Pure electric vehicles and hybrids including LPG/electric and very low emission/electric vehicles are being developed in parallel. This will mean developing parallel infrastructures to support them. A new fuelling infrastructure will be needed to supply fuel cell vehicles.

There are currently hundreds of thousands of petrol stations across Europe which could become battery exchanges or fast charge centres. Many may also become fuel-cell recharge centres and LPG providers. Alternatively, petrol station sites could disappear in the long term and exchange and/or recharge centres could be situated in entirely new locations. Tens of thousands of charging points must be installed and, since it will take hours to recharge batteries using current technologies, their location will be critical. One obvious option is to site recharging points outside homes, but that won’t be enough. Car parks at public transport interchanges could provide top-up services, as could parking meters, but who provides this infrastructure and controls pricing is a controversial subject.

But we also need to consider how these charging stations will be supplied with electricity. Smart grids will need to be put in place to help balance local and national supply and demand. But this needs to be considered at a country and European level. Micro-generation from solar panels and other sustainable sources will feed into the local grid to help power electric vehicles. But this is unlikely to be enough. We can also look to develop superconductors to reduce cable energy loss, along with substituting aluminium for copper cables, but this would be expensive and very disruptive.

What we do know is charging an electric vehicle on a domestic supply is the equivalent of boiling a kettle for four to eight hours per day – that is a lot of power to generate. Being creatures of habit, electric vehicle owners are also likely to plug in at the same time, for instance when they get home from work or when they arrive at the office, which just happens to coincide with peak demand. This means that electric vehicles will all be charging at the same time. If each country in Europe did this, the pressure this would be place on the energy infrastructure could be catastrophic.

At present each European country is developing its own approach with regards to infrastructure, but what makes more sense is to have a strategy across Europe. However, with the current economic climate the way it is, many are questioning where the money to roll out this type of infrastructure will come from.

The most likely option being discussed currently is the combination of private, semi-private and public charging which will vary from both fast chargers and slow chargers in the home and office. Most charge stations, it is predicted, will not have keypads or interactive screens nor will they have payment terminals in each station. The system will therefore require mobile payment solutions to solve these issues at charging stations.

It is also unlikely that all public charge stations will be connected to each other. In several countries we will see Interoperability systems to connect several operators to each other. Between these central networks it is unlikely that there will be direct connections or a single European Interoperability system drivers or “Emobility Virtual Network Operators” (EVNOs) who can connect through their main charge point operator to the operators in the other countries.

It is predicted that the most likely strategy across Europe will be that the network of charge stations will follow the telecoms setup whereby there will be a few large charge point network operators in each country which will make agreements in regards to roaming with network operators in other countries including small operators or mobility service operators who will deliver and sell the charge service to EV.

In the foreseeable future, electric vehicles are likely to dominate the landscape. Standards across Europe need to be agreed though, as it is essential there is consistency across the industry for everything from how charging is connected to billing. In September, the European motor industry went some way to achieve this by agreeing on a common system for charging any electric car across Europe. The ACEA, the automobile manufacturers’ trade association, called for one type of plug to become standard for all electric cars. Therefore enabling cars to be charged in any country no matter where they are purchased. However it is now up the European Union to enforce these standards and also look to agree a strategy for implementation across Europe.

In addition, if climate change is the main reason for switching to electric vehicles, we will have to ensure that the electricity powering them is not generated from fossil fuel. Instead, we will need a network of renewables, such as wind farms, tidal and wave barrages, solar and heat exchangers and nuclear power stations. There are a lot of questions that still need to be answered, but time is running out. The move to electric vehicles has to be part of an overall, fundamental restructuring of the European economy. Let’s just hope that this happens before the oil runs out.

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