Quantifying energy flexibility potential of ground electric vehicles in an airport with real behavior data

Abstract

Towards sustainable airports, vehicle electrification can not only reduce direct carbon emissions, but also provide great energy flexibility to integrate renewable energy. However, it remains challenging to quantify their potential, due to a lack of understanding of various vehicles’ complicated behavior in an airport. Hereby, a large-scale investigation into the behavior and energy consumption of all types of vehicles was performed in a Chinese hub airport. From the overall perspective of an airport, a behavior data-based simulation was conducted to evaluate their accessible storage (EAS) under different conditions, including charging infrastructure and flight schedule. For the full-potential case with a normal flight schedule, the airside vehicles have the largest share of EAS (60 %), followed by the landside vehicles in the ground transportation center (30 %) and the staff parking lots (10 %). The overall EAS is almost as large as the energy storage demand to realize a fully solar-supplied airport. Nevertheless, the current capacity is limited to only 15 % of the full potential by electrification rate and charging behavior. This study fills the gap of lacking behavior data of the vehicles in airports. The findings shed light on the role of vehicle electrification in airport decarbonization and provide guidelines for future practice.