Abstract:

In this study, the authors analyze the concurrent electrification of the mobility sector and investigate the impact of electric vehicles (EVs) on energy systems with a large share of renewable energy sources. In particular, this study builds an optimization framework to assess how EVs could compete and interplay with other energy storage technologies to minimize GHG-intensive electricity imports, leveraging the installed Swiss reservoir and pumped hydropower plants (PHS) as examples. Controlling bidirectional EVs or reservoirs shows the potential to decrease imported emissions by 33–40%, and 60% can be reached if they are controlled simultaneously and supported by PHS facilities when solar PV panels produce a large share of electricity. However, even if vehicle-to-grid (V2G) can help the energy transition, the authors find that its benefits will reach their full potential well before EVs penetrate the mobility sector to a large extent and that EVs only contribute marginally to long-term energy storage. Hence, even with the widespread adoption of EVs, we cannot expect V2G to single-handedly solve the growing mismatch problem between the production and consumption of electricity. The results suggest that Switzerland will remain a net importer of electricity in winter and a net exporter in summer since no control strategy will be able to fully flatten its net demand curve.