Modeling and Analysis of Load Growth Expected for Electric Vehicles in Pakistan (2021–2030)

Abstract

The world is facing severe environmental challenges as it heavily relies on a USD 100 trillion fossil-fuel-based economy. Its transition from a fuel-intensive to a material-intensive economy is not well understood. The conventional energy resources are responsible for the excessive generation of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions resulting in increased environmental degradation owing to climate change. The human impact has been cited as highly indisputable in this respect. Pakistan is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries highly suffering from such increased impact of climate change and, thus, has been warned against the excessive use of conventional resources. As such, in the premises of Pakistan, conventional products are being excessively utilized in both power generation and transport sectors. Apart from the electrical power sector, the transport sector is also one of the main contributors to GHG emissions. In this context, the automobile industry has emerged as an environmentally friendly solution, which presents Electric Vehicles (EVs) as an efficient and feasible alternative to mitigate the GHG footprint. The transition from fossil-fuel-based vehicles (FFVs) to EVs is, therefore, considered as a potential way to decarbonize the transport sector, where the socio-economic conditions may be improved to a significant extent. A major prerequisite under planning and implementation in Pakistan is forecasting of load growth of EVs in Pakistan. Therefore, this paper proposes a load growth model (load forecast), used to forecast the load growth expected for electric vehicles in Pakistan from 2021 to 2030. This paper discusses in detail the original and revised models. According to the revised model, total EV energy demand stood at 24.61 GWh in 2020 and increased up to 2862.54 GWh in 2030.