Photovoltaic potential of the fleet of urban vehicles

Abstract

The European Union committed to a 40% reduction in domestic
greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 in order to maintain globalwarming between
1.5°C and 2°C during the 21st Conference of the Parties. This pledge involves,
among other things, emission reductions in the transportation sector, which
accounts for a quarter of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation
electrification has been identified as a critical strategy for lowering
greenhouse gas emissions. Electric vehicles (EVs) are a critical component in a
future of more ecologically friendly transportation. Electric vehicles, on the
other hand, are not a panacea for decarbonizing the transportation sector, as
they contribute only when powered by renewable energy. Their adoption may cause
congestion issues on the electrical grid, but also inconvenient driving
experience due to lengthy charging times and restricted driving range. These
concerns can be addressed by integrating photovoltaics onto vehicles. Vehicle
integrated photovoltaics (VIPV) is a photovoltaic (PV) application that has
gained increasing attention in recent years due to the decrease in the cost of
solar cells and their increasing efficiency. The purpose of this research is to
establish a modeling methodology for estimating the photovoltaic potential of
an urban vehicle fleet. The model generates a user defined number of random
trajectories that simulate traffic within city limits and calculates the DC
energy output of the fleet’s vehicle integrated photovoltaics by taking into
account the vehicle’s trajectories, spatial irradiation data along the path and
during parking periods, the roof curvature, and the effect of the vehicle’s
speed on module temperature. This thesis examined city cars in Eindhoven with a
VIPV of 1.34 m2. The base case study investigated a fleet of 1000 cars
traveling at an average speed of 30 kilometers per hour, once per day, with
VIPV module height of 1.5 m. An automobile in this scenario produces close to
128.5 kWh of DC energy annually in average. The average consumption of the car
in this case is almost 131 Wh/km , which means that VIPV can increase the
driving range annually by approximately 981 kilometers. The fleet’s annual DC
energy output distribution is quite interesting as it is extremely close to the
Weibull distribution. The effect of numerous input factors on the DC energy
output of the fleet was explored. The larger the fleet size, the better the fit
between the fleet’s yearly DC energy distribution and the Weibull distribution.
The increased height of the VIPV module enhances DC energy generation, and the
influence of car speed on DC power output is significant, owing to the cooling
effect of the head-wind on the module’s temperature.