CHAPTER EIGHT - Improving Petroleum Displacement Potential of PHEVs Using Enhanced Charging Scenarios

Abstract

This chapter presents various studies to explore charging scenarios and environmental conditions that strike a balance among cost, life, and fuel savings while improving the petroleum displacement potential of a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). PHEV technology provides the potential to displace a significant portion of transportation petroleum consumption by using electricity for portions of trips. The primary energy carrier is the electricity generated from a diverse mix of domestic resources, including coal, nuclear, natural gas, wind, hydroelectric, and solar energy whereas the secondary energy carrier would be a chemical fuel stored on the vehicle such as gasoline, diesel, ethanol, or even hydrogen. The combination of fuel savings potential, consumer usage patterns, charging scenarios, battery life attributes, and battery costs have to be balanced and optimized to find the best low-cost solution for displacing fuel by using PHEV technology. A recently developed battery life assessment method into sets of PHEV simulations to understand the impacts of charge management scenario options and the potential to reduce battery size while providing equivalent or greater fuel savings is also presented. A PHEV-40 with a single evening charge and a PHEV-20 with opportunity charging throughout the day were considered, which finds that the long-term manufacturing cost of a PHEV-20 is expected to be on the order of $3,000 less than that of a PHEV-40. However the PHEV-20 opportunity charging scenario requires more frequent deep discharge cycles on the battery in comparison to the PHEV-40 nightly charging scenario and thus the PHEV-20 battery can be expected to degrade at a faster rate.