Overview
Electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles (EV, PHEV) have the potential to contribute significantly to solving contemporary and future environmental and economic challenges of mobility. In addition, they constitute new possibilities for smart grid management and the integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) into electricity networks.
Future mobility faces a number of serious challenges of environmental and economic nature which influence the development of alternatives to the conventional combustion engine and the mix of technologies for mobility. On the one hand, the concepts and technologies are driven by forces such as the security of energy supply, environmental effects and efforts to reduce CO2 emissions as well as economic parameters, which in the case of Europe principally includes the dependency on oil imports and volatile oil prices.
On the other hand, the enforcement of alternative mobility concepts requires consumer acceptance, meaning that they have to deliver the same kind of ease-of-use, safety and reliability to the car owners at reasonable prices, and an acceptable level of investment in infrastructure and equipment.
These challenges have led policy makers in Europe and around the globe to adopt policies and strategic approaches to facilitate the development of alternative mobility technologies. In an effort to improve security of energy supply and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the EU defined the objective of a 20% substitution of traditional automotive fuels by alternative fuels before the year 2020. In 2000, three alternative solutions were seen as promising: bio fuels, natural gas and hydrogen. However, there is uncertainty about the dominating future mobility technology and a strong demand to diversify the portfolio of technologies. A politic paradigm shift was performed by the European Parliament, when paper ITRE / 6 / 58782 was adopted offsetting the focus on bio fuels adhered to in the White Paper for Transport of the EC. Subsequently national actions have been taken to promote the development of electric mobility.
The disadvantages of EV in comparison to other technologies – this holds true only partly for PHEV – were mainly seen in the size and costs of batteries. In addition recharging requirement have made electric vehicles suitable for short-distance motoring only.
These technological and consumer acceptance barriers for the introduction of electric vehicles remain only partly valid until today. Car and battery manufactur
- Development of an analytical method to assess the impact of the mass introduction of EV and PHEV on the electricity grids
- Elaboration of recommendations for technological upgrading of the grid infrastructure and related ICT system solutions for grid management
- Elaboration of recommendations for policy makers to foster electric mobility (in terms of regulations and incentives)
- Identification and seizing of business opportunities for different stakeholders groups
- Elaboration of standardisation proposals => Joint European Approach
- Definition of future required RTD activities and projects
G4V Vision
Electricity grids of the future will supports customer at every point of interest. Independently of the location, time and power request the customer will be served like his situation asks for (e.g. minimum mileage request, tariffs, location etc.). Therefore the grids are smart enough to tackle the conflict of an grid owner between huge investment into conventional assets (cables, transformers etc.) and artificial intelligence for innovative grid operations to support millions of mobile customers (EVs and PHEVs). Furthermore the electricity infrastructure, with the support of the automatic communication with the car, will ensure:
- the optimal usage of the renewable energy sources
- services on the MV and LV-Level like Demand Response, Demand Side Management, Congestion management and other ancillary services
- the quality of power supply and the avoidance of power failures due to wrong charging procedures.
G4V Mission
The project will provide a set of recommendations which will help to evolve the European power grids to an intelligent power system which can serve an educed mass market of EVs and PHEVs in whole Europe. With this physical "backbone" several stakeholders could offer their customers individually different kind of services and products.
The project will be conducted within 18 months. The analysis has been broken down into seven technical work packages (WP) examining the different components of the system and WP to define the parameters and to consolidate the results of the analysis. The technical work packages are complemented by one managerial work package and one dedicated to the dissemination of project results. In addition to usual best practices of project management and monitoring it is especially important to enhance and facilitate the information flow between the work packages in order to allow iterative processes. The associated deliverables will be mainly presented in the form of reports.
Funding
Results
A cost effective deployment of EVs should be done by promoting slow charging
(up to 3.7kW), complemented with some public faster charging stations.
The charging of EVs should be controlled including the needs and constraints of
the DSOs, using strategies and signals which start from country-specific enhanced
'business as usual' solutions in the short term to more advanced solutions as EV
penetration increases.The aggregation function facilitates the provision of flexibility services by EVs,
given the volumes and time-scales required to participate in different markets
The value of the EVs flexibility services, is system specific and very sensitive to the
charging power, efficiency losses and battery degradation costs
Decentralized market based approach improves the ability of integrating EVs but
requires advanced ICT and a market/cost based approach
V2G was found to have low value for both the aggregation and decentralized
market based approach
Strategy targets
Innovating for the future: technology and behaviour
- Promoting more sustainable development