Electro-mobility: emission-free on the move
Where renewable energies such as wind power are used, a car that is exclusively powered by electricity will be emissionfree even today
Electric engines will be the defining face of future mobility. This will be the only way of achieving Germany’s and Europe’s climate protection goals in the field of traffic and transportation. An electric car itself does not produce emissions; generating the electricity it needs, however, does. For example, due to the high proportion of nuclear energy and the rapidly growing amount of renewable energies in today’s E.ON electricity mix, an electric car with a consumption of 15 kilowatt hours per 100 kilometers will only generate 75 grams of CO2 per kilometer. This places the vehicle substantially below the limit of 120 grams per kilometer for a car manufacturer’s fleet consumption that will be prescribed by the EU from 2012. Whererenewable energies such as wind power
are used, a car that is exclusively powered
by electricity will be emission-free even
today.
Many countries want to take additional
steps to support the breakthrough of electro-
mobility. In London, for example, electric cars are exempt from the congestion
charge due to their positive environmental
characteristics.
The decisive benefit of
electro-mobility is its independence from
individual energy sources. While combustion
engines will always require gasoline
or natural gas as fuel, electric cars can
benefit from the current shift in power
generation toward renewable energies
and low-emission technologies – without
requiring any modifications to the technology
inside the vehicle. Regardless of the
energy source, the additional power
demand from electric mobility is manageable:
The German federal government expects
there to be about one million electrically
powered cars by 2020. These vehicles
would increase the current annual power
consumption of approximately 600 billion
kilowatt hours by less than half a percent.
Even a total of about 10 million electric
cars in Germany – which would make one
in four cars electric – would increase electricity
demand by just three to five percent,
a demand which could be met without
the need to build one single additional
power plant. However, one thing is necessary,
indeed decisive: Vehicle charging
needs to be intelligently managed so that
it happens outside of times when electricity
demand is high.
Electric cars can act as a decentralized
energy store
Electric cars will make a significant contribution
to the use and development of
renewable energies: Together, the batteries
of many electric cars form a large,
decentralized electricity repository which
can provide a buffer for weather-related
fluctuations in energy production from
renewable energy sources. An intelligent
interface is necessary to connect them to
the electrical grid.
It is not even beyond the bounds of possibility
for electric vehicles – those parked in
an office complex’s underground garage
during the day, for example – to feed electricity
back into the electric grid. If only
half of the million electric cars expected
to be in use in 2020 were connected to the
grid and provided it with a mere 20 percent
of their battery capacity, the feed-in
of electricity into the network would be
equivalent to the output of two pumpedstorage
power plants. Such potential
developments mean that electric cars can
make a key contribution toward the use
of renewable energy sources.