Here’s why South Africa needs solar-powered EV charging stations
Fuel vs charging
In South Africa, charging electric vehicles with coal-based power could result in more emissions than running those vehicles on petrol, except when the vehicles are also charged at work.
Charging vehicles at the workplace using solar photovoltaic augmented carports would reduce the carbon footprint. This would be the case whether the charging took place only at work or at home too. More electric vehicles could be supported by Eskom and employers could potentially generate income from solar energy.
From the employer’s perspective, at-work charging scenarios, where they sell electricity to the employee, have an annual net positive revenue. Any excess solar energy can be fed back into the building. The financial benefit to the employee is larger when employees charge only at work.
The scenario where electric vehicles are charged only at home would put Eskom under the most pressure. Adding just 4 million electric vehicles would exceed the energy capacity of a fully operational grid. Clearly, the carbon footprint would be higher in this scenario.
Going forward
With the increasing threat of climate change due to the emissions of greenhouse gases, it’s necessary to explore greener solutions, such as moving to electric vehicles. But in a country where the grid itself is a major contributor to emissions – and can’t meet power demand anyway – more planning is needed.
Solar photovoltaic carports at the workplace will reduce the impact on Eskom, save costs, and decrease the carbon footprint. It’s likely that owners will also charge their electric vehicles at home, so it’s important to offer them incentives to use the most sustainable balance of home and work charging.
Since our focus was on the electrical and environmental impact of electric vehicles, we limited our environmental assessment to the operational life-cycle of the vehicle. We excluded the environmental impact of production and shipment and later disposal. Future work should assess the full life-cycle environmental impact of combustion engines and electric vehicles, and also evaluate the emerginghydrogen power.
Given that South Africa has almost 300,000 minibus taxis, we are also exploring electric minibus taxis with solar-powered taxi ranks, which could eventually even help with grid stability.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyMJ (Thinus) Booysen, Associate Professor at the Electrical & Electronic Engineering Department,Stellenbosch UniversityandMark Apperley, Professor of Computer Science,University of Waikatounder a Creative Commons license. Kevin Buresh, a Masters in engineering student at Stellenbosch University, also contributed to this article.Read theoriginal article.
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Story byThe Conversation
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