Electric vehicles: To what extent are environmentally friendly and cost effective? – Comparative study by european countries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2021.111548Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A comparative study of the economic and environmental viability between different vehicles was carried out.

  • The vehicles types studied were electric (EVs) and internal combustion engine vehicles.

  • It is shown that the economical payback time of EVs is reached in an average of 10 years for European countries.

  • The environmental benefit of electric vehicles is achieved in a relatively time of 3 to 4 years.

Abstract

Energy and environmental issue are among the most relevant challenges to be solved in the near future. Electric vehicles (EVs) will play a key role in the solution by positively contribute to these two issues. The growth of the EV market both in Europe and the rest of the World in last years, arose a relevant question: to what extent are electric vehicles eco-friendly and cost effective in comparison with internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs)?

This work presents a comparative study between battery electric vehicles and ICEVs from different European countries, with special focus on two relevant issues: economic viability and ecological impact. It is shown that in the European Countries, the economical payback is much variable. In other countries, the economic payback can vary between travelled distances of about 2500 km (Portugal) and 335 000 km (Czech Republic).

The environmental benefit is reached after relatively low travelled distances, between 30 000 km (Norway) and 190 000 km (Poland), being more evenly distributed when compared to the economical payback. It is also shown how economic and environmental benefits depend on mobility profile, being improved for longer travel distance profiles.

It was concluded that the reduction of the price of the EVs is necessary to make them more competitive in the automotive market. Further, it is important to combine both economic and environmental benefits by adopting policies within the European Union to reach a more uniform reality among the different countries, with more levelled prices and revenues (incentives, fees and taxes).

Introduction

Fossils fuels are nowadays the main source of energy to meet humanity's energy demands, which leads to global warming due to greenhouse gases emissions, among other environmental impacts. Thus, environmental and energy issues are at the top of the list of the major global concerns to be solved in coming years [1,2]. In order to address and solve these critical challenges, the focus is directed towards obtaining clean energy systems of different types, including conversion, harvesting and storage systems [3,4].

To reduce dependence on fossil fuels and consequently their environmental impact related to carbon dioxide emissions, renewable energies such as solar, wind or water are used to efficiently generate electricity at low production costs [5,6]. After the moment at which electricity is generated, it must be efficiently used or stored for its use in portable applications including smartphones, tablets, computers, diverse wearables and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) [7,8]. For these applications, the most widely used energy storage devices are batteries, which store electricity in the form of chemical energy [8,9]. Taking into account the diverse battery types, lithium-ion batteries represent the best-performing rechargeable battery technology due to their higher capacity and stand out with respect to other battery types because of being lighter, showing lower self-discharge, no memory effect, and higher number of charge/discharge cycles, among other advantages [10].

Currently, lithium-ion batteries are the driving force for electric vehicles (EVs) applications, but it is still needed to increase their efficiency by a factor of five to achieve the autonomy of a conventional internal combustion vehicle (>600 km) with small size and at a competitive price [11]. Besides lithium-ion batteries, other systems such as fuel cells (FC) have been implemented in vehicles. FC hydrogen systems, similar to batteries, can directly convert chemical energy into electrical energy. It has been shown that in the event of collision fuel cell vehicles do not present additional danger with respect to conventional vehicles, but further studies are needed to prove this fact [12]. When compared to electric vehicles, some disadvantages include the high cost of hydrogen production, the lack of suitable supporting infrastructure and the correlation between the size of the battery and the mass of the vehicle, among others [13]. Thus, hydrogen FC can be an alternative for future clean energy for vehicle applications but its high cost (platinum catalysts), high flammability and storage difficulty hold back its massive implementation in the market [14].

Currently, electric mobility is still characterized by a small driving range, with manufacturers investing strong efforts to increase their range. Further, it is expected that the EV market will increase by a factor of 52 up to 2030, with huge investment in battery manufacturing [15]. The EV concept integrates the full BEVs and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). BEVs are vehicles that are totally powered by chemical energy stored in batteries without any other propulsion source. On the other hand, PHEVs hold two kinds of propulsion sources, one from batteries and other from combustion engine that can be used simultaneously or alternately [16]. Today, EVs are the key solution for reducing transport-level CO2 emissions, allowing manufacturers to meet EU CO2 reduction targets to 95 g CO2/km from 2020 [17].

Several studies on the viability of BEVs have been carried out in recent years. Large countries with high vehicles fleet, such as China, started to convert their internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) into BEVs, with the acquisition of more than 100 million e-bikes reported as the largest single adoption EV in history. A comparison of CO2, NOx, HC and PM2.5 emissions between ICEVs and BEVs was performed in 34 cities of China and the PM2.5 particles environmental health impact was analyzed [18]. The study concludes that, once China has a coal-heavy electricity system, the replace from ICEVs to BEVs will increase the CO2 and PM2.5 emissions leading to an increase of health risk near to the power plants. The necessity of power sector improvements should be thus also considered [18]. Further, an attempt has been performed in clarifying the differences in emissions and environmental impacts between BEVs and ICEVs [19].

The decarbonization of energy economy is necessary and so, more reliable and efficient energy production and storage systems should be improved and implemented. The increasing use of renewable energy production plays a key role in this regard, as it provides clean and low environmental impact energy. Hydropower is one of the most reliable technologies in this context, as it provides a more regular energy output when compared to other sources such as solar and wind, that also play an essential and increasing role in this energy transition [20,21]. Towards the different energy storage systems, the efficiency of lithium ion batteries can reach 95%, possessing high efficient system as flywheel (with a high self-discharge – 1.3 to 100%), superconductor magnet (with a low energy density – 6 Whl−1) and super-capacitor (low power rating – 0.01 to 1 MW) [22]. PHEVs can be an intermediate step for the reduction of gas emissions from ICEVs and the necessary evolution of the power grids for the BEVs usage [23]. In this context, the possible impacts of the expansion in the charging grid [24] and power generation [25] were studied.

Different approaches have been studied as the effects of car-sharing [26] and the second use of spent BEV batteries [27]. The possibility of lower the lithium demand and other metals for the battery production is a very important issue [28]. Different battery recycling methods as pyrometallurgical recovery, physical separation, hydrometallurgical metals reclamation, direct recycling and even biological metals reclamation were studied to prevent the landfill, secure the lithium and other metals exhaustive demand and also to reduce the production necessity, avoiding new gas emissions [29].

The BEV cars compared with the ICEV cars are more expensive due to the battery extra cost [30]. However, this extra cost difference is decreasing since 2010, due to the technological evolution of the batteries, growing of the BEVs in market sells, growing model's availability and government incentives [30]. Although, different studies can be found in literature about the BEVs topic [30], there are currently no studies to evaluate the real cost of BEVs when compared with ICEVs, from the different European Country user perspective. There are significant differences between each European Country in the energetic mixes and the fuel/electricity user costs that will influence the reliability of the BEV acquisition over an ICEV. Furthermore, the usage experience of the BEV and ICEV along time are not considered. The purpose of this work is to fulfill this literature gap, and to present a complete and objective analysis of the environmental and economic consequences in BEV acquisition in different European countries. Also, the EVs position within the global market is analyzed and the advantages of their use are compared to the ICEVs. The quantitative model is presented for the first time and allows to calculate to what extent it is suitable to acquire a BEV and allows to understand the main factors affecting the selection of a BEV. The relevance of this work is stated by the critical analysis that combines both economic and environmental factors, allowing to properly compare how profitable is the BEV when compared with an ICEV, for each studied case. The data analysis of this work is based in relevant parameters, including the different energetic mixes and the average travelled distance of each country. Also, this work provides suitable information not only for the scientific community but also for the decision makers and general public, to understand this new evolution stage in the vehicles sector that is occurring nowadays.

In the following, the main characteristics, market and advantages of the EVs are introduced. Then, the methodology of the study is indicated. After a comparative analysis of the electric vehicles with respect to ICEVs in different European countries, focusing on economic and environmental aspects, a critical analysis of the obtained data is presented and the main challenges in the area highlighted. Finally, the main conclusions of the study are summarized.

Section snippets

Electric vehicles: characteristics, market and advantages

EVs have almost a 200-year history, appearing in the mid-nineteenth century, when Ányos Jedlik developed the first electric motor in 1828 [31]. In 1884, Thomas Parker developed the first rechargeable battery electric car in London, suitable for short commutes within cities. After a time without large interest on this type of cars, the energy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s contributed to the revival of interest in EV technology due to the large dependence of car mobility on oil market

Methodology

In this work, a series of data were analyzed, in order to evaluate the economic and environmental benefits of the use of a BEV, when compared with a similar ICEV. The study considers different variables including Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and passenger mobility per capita, electricity and fuel costs, and prices of the vehicles, as presented in Table 3. The selected BEV was the Nissan Leaf 40 kW with 150 hp, which is one of the most sold BEV in Europe [57], and the ICEV was the Volkswagen

Electric vehicles: comparative analysis by country

Different realities, including acquisition costs, energy and fuel cost and energetic mixes present among Europe countries lead to different economic and environmental outcomes. These different parameters are needed for understanding the key aspects associated to BEV and ICEV acquisition and use. Furthermore, the presented analysis will help to quantitatively determinate to what extent are BEVs cost effective and environmentally friendly when compared to ICEVs.

Critical analysis and future challenges

The electric mobility concept is increasingly being adopted by the society, partially due to concerns on the environmental issues caused by the traditional ICEVs. However, this approach is also associated to an economic point of view. The advances in lithium-ion battery technology allows BEVs to be increasingly competitive when compared to the ICEV in range and costs, and the predictable growing of the BEV market in the incoming years will bring these two realities even closer. This work

Conclusions

The present works reports on the economic and environmental viability of the acquisition and use of BEV and ICEV in several European countries. It is concluded that BEVs are profitable on a reasonable timeframe of about 10 years (for average passenger mobility per capita of each country) in a couple of European countries. The timeframe ranges from 1 year for Portugal to 33 years for Slovakia, as examples. In some cases, as Denmark and Spain, this benefit is achieved at the purchase moment once

Credit author statement

Carlos M. Costa: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. João C. Barbosa: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Helder Castro: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Renato Gonçalves: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Senentxu Lanceros-Méndez: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) for financial support under the framework of Strategic Funding grants UID/FIS/04650/2020, UID/EEA/04436/2020 and UID/QUI/0686/2020; and project PTDC/FIS-MAC/28157/2017. The authors also thank the FCT for financial support under grants SFRH/BD/140842/2018 (J.C.B.) and FCT's Stimulus of Scientific Employment 2020.04028. CEECIND (C.M.C.) and CEECIND/00833/2017 (R.G.). Financial support from the Basque Government Industry and

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