Analysis of ecological benefits of traffic flow electrification

Abstract

Road transport is responsible for 22% of the total CO2 emissions, 39% of NOx emission and 10% share of particulate matters (PM10, PM2.5) emission. The use of passenger cars, as an extremely dominant category of vehicles, is at constant growth, which causes an increase or insufficient reduction of Greenhouse Gas emission, despite the technological improvements of exaust emission devices. Due to the growing harmful effects on the environment and human health, as well as the recent scandals associated with internal combustion engine tehcnology („Dieselgate scandal”), development of new technology is fast forward toward electric vehicles.The biggest automotive corporations plans dominant fleet electrification in the next 10 years. However, sudden share increase of the electric vehicles in the traffic flow can lead to the capacity overcoming of the electricity grid network, or the issue of the "ecological footprint" of such a trend. In this paper, the overall environmental impact (so-called Well-to-Wheel analysis) of the increasing number of electric vehicles was analysed. Comparison analysis of vehicles equipped with internal combustion egines and electric vehicles showed the absence of Greenhouse Gass emisson reduction in countries with low percentage of electricity gained from renewable energy sources. Well-to-Wheel analysis was also conducted for several scenarios of electric vehicles participation in traffic flow in Republic of Serbia i.e their influence on electricity grid network and its emission.