Electrification of Highway Transportation with Solar and Wind
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sustainability Article Electrification of Highway Transportation with Solar and Wind Energy Van Can Nguyen 1, Chi-Tai Wang 1,* and Ying-Jiun Hsieh 2 1 Institute of Industrial Management, National Central University, Taoyuan City 320317, Taiwan; [email protected] 2 Institute of Technology Management, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung City 402, Taiwan; arborfi[email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +886-3-427-5033 Abstract: Global warming has triggered waves of public awareness to surface very strongly world- wide, urging to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions in a timely fashion. Among all feasible approaches to achieving this goal, using renewables to replace fossil fuels and electric vehicles (EVs) to replace conventional internal combustion engine vehicles is arguably a top-priority task. However, there is a severe lack of practical approaches to measuring a proper renewable mix for powering EVs in a large highway network while also considering renewables’ seasonal availability and the possible need to regulate the production and consumption of renewable energy with grid-scale battery arrays installed at certain locations. This urgent need motivates developing the mixed-integer programming model as presented in this paper. Furthermore, a comprehensive case study on Taiwan’s national highways covers such useful knowledge as the process to prepare key numeric data, especially local solar and wind energy and highway traffic, in-depth analysis on model solutions to reveal the overall availability of renewable energy across the highway network, and close measurements on the required investments. These findings support using renewable energy to power EVs on a national highway and reveal the importance of local business involvements. However, a relatively small Citation: Nguyen, V.C.; Wang, C.-T.; country, such as Taiwan, can still display significant variations in renewable power availability. In a Hsieh, Y.-J. Electrification of Highway stand-alone setting for power usage, these variations would result in massive volumes of renewable Transportation with Solar and Wind energy not used by highway travel in some seasons. These details demonstrate the applicability and Energy. Sustainability 2021, 13, 5456. values of the proposed model in a real situation. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13105456 Keywords: global warming; greenhouse gas (GHG); renewable energy; electric vehicles (EVs) Academic Editor: Ayman Attya Received: 4 April 2021 Accepted: 9 May 2021 Published: 13 May 2021 1. Introduction Excessive use of coal, oil and other fossil fuels by mankind has created environmental Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral problems of various magnitudes worldwide. Among these problems, global warming, with regard to jurisdictional claims in triggered by high volumes of greenhouse gases (GHGs) continuously released into the published maps and institutional affil- atmosphere for many decades, receives the most attention due to its potentials to create iations. disastrous impacts on the entire world. In response, delegates from those 195 countries participating in the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties made a landmark decision on 12 December 2015 that they unanimously agreed to adopt The Paris Agreement [1], thereby declaring a specific temperature-mitigation target for all mankind to achieve so Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. that global warming can be kept in check: Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 ◦C This article is an open access article above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase distributed under the terms and to 1.5 ◦C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly conditions of the Creative Commons reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”. [1] Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// Reducing GHGs emitted into the atmosphere is key to mitigating global warming. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). In terms of global emission volume, transport emits the second-most GHGs among all Sustainability 2021, 13, 5456. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13105456 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Sustainability 2021, 13, 5456 2 of 28 major economic sectors (only next to the power sector). As an example, transport alone was responsible for creating 7.3 GtCO2e (gigatonnes of equivalent carbon dioxide), or 23%, of the entire world’s CO2 emissions in 2012 [2]. A significant portion of these emissions is produced by internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) burning petroleum fuels. In many industrialized countries, this dependency on fossil fuel for road transportation is so heavy that as much as 96% of transportation energy is extracted from petroleum fuels [3]. In the wake of global warming, this situation has naturally stimulated strong motivations worldwide to decarbonize road transport as quickly as possible, and replacing conventional ICEVs with new vehicles designed to use so-called alternative fuels is perceived by many as an essential strategy among all possible approaches. Using such fuels as electricity, natural gas, hydrogen or biodiesel rather than conventional fossil fuels, these alternative- fuel vehicles (AFVs) [4–10] are more environmentally friendly than ICEVs. According to United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), by adopting AFVs, improving fuel efficiency and adopting other effective measures, global road transport can potentially reduce emissions by as much as 2.88 GtCO2e annually around 2030 [11]. This will certainly make a significant contribution to the worldwide campaign against global warming. There are several types of electric vehicles (EVs) [12]. Among them, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are those EVs powered with pure electricity, which means they do not produce any exhaust emissions to pollute the air or nourish global warming. When moving on the road, BEVs are also quieter than other vehicles because their power source is an electric motor. Fuel efficiency is another major attracting feature of BEVs. According to Lorf et al. [13], the power source is the single most important factor influencing vehicle energy consumption. In their comprehensive study, which covers 40 different vehicles, BEVs deliver a group average of 144 Wh/km. In other words, they require an approximate 144 Watt-hour of electricity to travel one kilometer of distance. In the same study, the fuel performance for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and ICEVs is 271, 389 and 550 Wh/km, respectively. Hence, on average, ICEVs require sev- eral times of energy than BEVs to travel the same distance; moreover, the higher the degree of electrification, the better the vehicle fuel economy [13] (p.15)! The attractiveness of BEVs further includes a lower manufacturing resource requirement because their powertrain is generally simpler in configuration than other types of vehicles [14]. This also implies fewer resources required to process BEVs at the end of their lifecycle. Last but not the least, when there is a sufficient number of BEVs running on the road one day, they can collectively be used as a gigantic, mobile energy reservoir, saving or releasing power whenever and wher- ever needed. Called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) [15,16], this is an emerging technology, which is expected to improve power grid utilization by a better balancing power supply with actual demand. Therefore, BEVs can bring various benefits to the economy, environment and society, that is, the “triple bottom line” of sustainable development [17,18]. As the major concerns surrounding their convenience of use, especially limited driving range and restricted battery charging locations, are being and will continue to be improved, BEVs are arguably a very attractive substitute for conventional ICEVs. Although the aforementioned electrification of road transport is a promising strategy, it is still necessary to power BEVs with as much renewable energy (RE) as possible. According to European Environment Agency (2016), if BEVs are totally powered with RE, their lifecycle CO2 emissions will be approximately 50% less than the volumes emitted by PHEVs also powered with renewables, and two-thirds less than the volumes emitted by ICEVs powered with petroleum fuels. On the other hand, when totally using coal electricity, BEVs will ironically surpass ICEVs to become the champion of CO2-producing vehicles [12] (p.45)! Noori et al. [19] also confirm the significance of power sources to the true effectiveness of BEVs in combating global warming. The necessity to enable BEVs to run on RE is further supported by the fact that electricity/heat is the top CO2- emitting sector, and the top-two sectors (that is, electricity/heat and transport) are already responsible for creating nearly two-thirds of global CO2 emissions [2]. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to coordinate these two sectors, so their decarbonization can receive the Sustainability 2021, 13, 5456 3 of 28 effect of “one plus one greater than two” [20,21]. In recent years, the rapid decline in solar and wind energy costs, which have fallen below 3.0 US cents/kWh (kilowatt-hour) in more than one country [22], has created a cost-competitive situation for these renewables, allowing them to accelerate market expansion in the current power mix. At the same time, there are also studies confirming the feasibility of using only renewables to drive the entire economy [19,21,23]. For road transport, García-Olivares et al. [24] confirm the feasibility of a 100% renewable transportation and expect it to deliver energy savings as much as 69% (while maintaining the same service level as provided in 2014). Chandra Mouli et al. [25] and Bhatti et al. [26] investigate technical issues for using solar energy on EVs. Onat et al. [27] observe a notably lower water consumption in most American states when their EVs use solar PV (photovoltaic) as the only power source. Moreover, in addition to rooftop and open ground, solar PV can now be installed at several new locations, such as road surface [28] and water surface [29]. All these are contributions accomplished to facilitate/accelerate the decarbonization of the power and road transport sectors.