Renewable energy and efficiency for sustainable urban mobility: a not-so-distant future

This article was written by Pablo Cisneros and Andrés Alcalá

One alternative that could revolutionize the market and improve supply management is the use of electric vehicles and more specifically, their batteries which, by feeding their surplus energy into the grid during high demand hours, could replace energy from other more polluting, more expensive sources. With the rapid development of recent years and the improved competitiveness of unconventional renewable energy (NCRE) sources, such as wind or solar, we are witnessing a favorable scenario of sustainability and efficiency that enhances supply of the energy matrix of countries, ensuring more efficient processes, control facilities and greater automation, in addition to the benefits in air quality, noise reduction and productivity.

The advent of electric mobility and the increasing use of such vehicles may bring about associated benefits that transcend the transport sector. While this will not solve congestion problems, it focuses on the decarbonization of the sector, which currently demands around 70% of energy from fossil fuels, according to the IAE.    

Vehicles and electrical system management

Energy efficiency in internal combustion vehicles has been shown to reach only 15%. In other words, around 85% of the energy required to move a vehicle is lost.

This is because the energy is transformed and evaporated during fuel production and logistics: refining, transport, loading and unloading of the product to the gas station, pouring it into the car. A similar loss occurs during combustion inside the vehicle’s engine.

Electric vehicles, in contrast, with no combustion process and an energy matrix composition with a high NCRE index, can perform with an efficiency of close to 80%. Greater efficiency, however, is not of much use if these savings cannot be fed into the electrical grid to create additional benefits to drivers and the system as a whole. Therefore, in order to store energy that can be transferred into the grid based on direct transactions between system users, a smart charging technology is being implemented, which involves an advanced degree of standardization, interoperability and development of such transactions through networked platforms with a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) similar to bitcoins or blockchain.

The use of energy accumulators – such as the increasingly popular electric vehicles – could flatten the load curve in power efficiency and generation. Thus, the availability of cheap energy in the morning can be used to charge devices that, in a not too distant future, could deliver energy at high-demand hours.

In addition to the benefits of decarbonization, opportunities open up in existing or new markets, driven by:

• Increased energy sales without substantially modifying grid assets
• Sales during hours of high infrastructure availability and convenience
• Greater opportunities for NCRE generators

Looking to the near future

The concept of smart charging has great development potential for grids and energy suppliers as well as for users of electric vehicles of any size.

The path towards more sustainable mobility requires replacing conventional automotive technologies with zero- or low-emission vehicles, to prove that it is possible to overcome the barriers to adopting new technologies through a joint effort between the public and private sectors.

While a major impact is expected in the short term, it is necessary to support the energy demand growth by ensuring the expected growth of electric transport, always optimizing the electric load curve with electric transport as an energy storage vehicle that, thanks to technology facilities for logging and verifying network transactions, will usher in a smart and sustainable future of electric mobility, which now does not seem so distant.