Running on empty?

March 09, 2020 / By mobanmarket

Running on empty?

Europe’s quest for emissions-free transport faces many problems

The routine use of combustion engines in vehicles is something of an anomaly in this day and age. Most items used on a daily basis, from computers to air-conditioning, are powered by electricity. How the electricity is generated may vary – nuclear power, gas or renewables – but electricity is the preferred choice of power for end use. Yet cars are still powered by individual fossil fuel, a remarkably inefficient process and one that is a major contributor to global emissions.

Work on electric vehicles has been going on for decades, and there are many theories – some of them involving conspiracies – about why they have never really taken off. The climate- change crisis and the rise in fuel prices have given new impetus to development of hybrid and electric vehicles. But their success remains limited, because of three fundamental constraints: infrastructure, storage, and range.

In January, the European Commission put forward a proposal to address the first issue as part of the alternative-fuels package. This would require member states to build a minimum number of refuelling stations for alternative fuels (such as liquefied and compressed natural gas) and electric vehicles by 2020. The aim is to end the vicious circle by which consumers refuse to buy cars that run on alternative fuels because the infrastructure does not exist, and there are too few alternative-fuel cars on the road to justify investment in infrastructure.

The proposal would harmonise standards across the EU. Electric vehicles in France, for example, use a different plug from those on the roads elsewhere in the EU. The Commission’s proposal would change that.

“China and the US plan to have more than six million electric vehicles on the road by 2020,” said Siim Kallas, the European commissioner for transport, earlier this year. “This is a major opportunity for Europe to establish a strong position in a fast-growing global market.”

In the fast lane

Germany, France, Spain, the UK and the Netherlands are leading the way in the development of electric vehicles in Europe, and these countries have already set national targets for the number of vehicles they want to see on the roads in 2020. These range from a goal of one million in Germany to 2.5 million in Spain.

Storage and range have been other major problems holding back electric cars. A car’s range is limited by the power of the batteries, which may need hours to recharge. Different technologies have been proposed to rectify this problem. The Israeli venture Better Place tried to remedy this through the use of battery-switching stations that would replace a used battery with a new one in a matter of minutes. However, the company filed for bankruptcy in Denmark because of the high cost of setting up the stations.

Several battery technologies are being developed to overcome the range limitations. Hydrogen fuel-cell batteries could offer a solution. Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands is researching new fuel cells and in July achieved a major breakthrough in the production of hydrogen from solar energy. Hydrogen does not produce carbon dioxide emissions and can be easily stored. The problem is that producing and storing it is currently a very expensive and complicated process. Delft’s research has focused on using sunlight to split water into its component elements of hydrogen and oxygen, which could make the production of hydrogen more cost- effective.

“The question with batteries is: can they be made cheap enough, lightweight enough and in a small enough volume,” says Bernard Dam, who is leading the project. “Hydrogen is the cheapest thing to be used as a range extender for electric cars.” Dam says that, as research continues, there is no reason why different charging and battery technologies cannot be used concurrently.

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“There are different technologies in the mobile telephone market; I don’t see why there should be only one technology for electric cars. It depends very much on the interaction between the battery management technology and the charging technology of the loading station.

“I would rather have the infrastructure set up in a way that slow charging can be done everywhere, and for emergencies you could have fast charging,” he says. “But I would not have fast charging as the dominant way to charge a car, because it wastes too much energy.”

However, only once a technology has achieved dominance are consumers likely to adopt it.