Electric Vehicles (EVs) offer a promising technology pathway for cutting down oil use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions on a per-kilometre basis. EVs can achieve 50 g of CO2 emission per kilometre compared to the conventional, internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, which emit between 100 and 150 g of CO2 per kilometre.
Electric Vehicle Initiative (EVI) launched under the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) partnership aims at scaling up the adoption of EVs worldwide. Under EVI, several countries have adopted ambitious EV implementation targets (Refer table: Ambitious plans of countries in EV space).
India at the forefront
The National Electric Mobility Mission Plan (NEMMP) 2020 and Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of (Hybrid &) Electric Vehicles (FAME India) schemes target 6û7 million in the sale of hybrid and electric vehicles from 2020 onwards. A report published by Niti Aayog targets a reduction of 156 MTOE (million tonnes of oil equivalent) in diesel and petrol consumption for 2030, implying a net savings of roughly Rs 5,000 billion in 2030.
In August 2017, the Minister of Power announced that India plans to have only electric cars on the road by 2030. Energy Efficiency Services (EESL) has procured 10,000 EVs from Tata Motors and Mahindra Electric. Several states have announced their EV policies.
Volvo announced that all its new cars would be either hybrid or electric from 2019. Jaguar will only make electric and hybrid cars from 2020 and Volkswagen, the world's largest car manufacturer, said it is building batteries that can run automobiles for up to 1,000 km. ACME group is developing charging stations and battery swapping stations, and is providing them to the taxi aggregator, Ola û in which investors like Softbank have made big bets - for its pilot project at Nagpur which includes 200 EVs including bus, auto and car.
EV charging infrastructure broadly includes three levels of terminals: level 1, level 2 (fast chargers) and level 3 (rapid chargers). These chargers vary substantially in their costs and charging times and need to be created as per the requirement of the location. EVs can be charged externally through electric cable, battery swapping and wireless charging (an upcoming technology that uses electromagnetic field to transfer energy between two objects).
Batteries constitute the largest share in the cost of an EV. However, over the past few years, battery costs have fallen from $600 (2012) to $250 (2017) and are expected to go down to as low as $100 by 2024.
Crossing the hurdle
The Ministry of Power recently clarified that the public charging facilities of EVs will not require any license. This provides tremendous opportunity for private sector and large public sector companies. The following four business models are practised across the world:
a. Manufacturer-owned and operated network (e.g., Tesla Supercharger network)
b. Third party-owned and operated network (e.g., Charge point, EV go)
c. Distribution Licensee-owned EV charging infrastructure (e.g., distribution companies (DISCOMs) setting up their network)
d. Privately-owned battery swapping stations
Electricity distribution utilities will be in-charge of managing these ômobile assets.ö Internationally, electricity regulators have played a proactive role.
1. Several regulators have approved the capital expenditure of charging station installation as a part of utility budget.
2. Electricity DISCOMs offer attractive time-of-day tariffs to promote off-peak charging.
3. Electricity DISCOMs in the US, Japan and China are experimenting with utilising EVs as grid assets, either by using them as a demand response resource or by providing ancillary services through vehicle-to-grid technologies.
With large-scale penetration and its integration with the grid, EVs can potentially provide the following services to the grid:
i. Ancillary services such as peak power saving, spinning reserve, voltage and frequency regulations
ii. Reactive power regulation
iii. Integration of large-scale renewable energy sources (RES)
iv. Utilisation of stranded assets during periods of low demand
A smart grid platform can provide solutions for the integration of EVs into the grid and can create a functional V2G technology through an easily accessible, advanced communication infrastructure. An EV, through an electric vehicle management system (EVM) built in the vehicle, can receive and send information to the aggregator or the owner, and vice versa. Smart meters (SM) can be embedded in EVMs to facilitate real time energy measurement, communication and control, and create a smart charging schedule to optimise the available grid power through advanced bidirectional data exchange.
Minimal grid impact
The authors performed a simulation in MATLAB/Simulink to study the effect of slow and fast charging on the commercial feeders. (Refer table: Simulation result for commercial feeder)
From the table, it can be observed that: