Renewable electricity for transition towards emission-free Gothenburg by 2030

Abstract: Electric vehicles are on the march and are estimated to transform the current transport sector in the upcoming years. Sweden has set up a national objective of becoming independent from fossil fuels in the transport sector by 2030. Electricity as transport fuel is prompted to be one of the most promising solutions to reach the targets and reduce the emissions. This thesis investigates the municipality of Gothenburg as a case study to see how much electricity would be required to supply the transport sector for three different scenarios, including a business as usual scenario, a moderate electrification scenario, and a full electrification scenario. The full electrification, i.e. 100% electrification, is investigated further to see the renewable generation requirements to supply this transport electrification. The electricity demand calculations are developed in collaboration with an engineering consultancy company(Sweco) and are a part of a larger project, Vad behövs fö ratt elektrifiera transportsystemet i Göteborg? (PussEL). The study finds that the municipality of Gothenburg holds promising potential to further exploit renewable electricity production from offshore wind and solar PV tocover the new annual addition of 0.81 TWh. A set of simulations in order to determine the renewable electricity generation from the available resources are performed using the EnergyPLAN model. In this study, the charging of electric vehicles is assumed to be overnight charging as the major charging strategy and for this reason a backup electricity generation is included to cover the whole demand during any hours. The simulations show that a need of 100MW back-up capacity is required to ensure that the demand is covered during any hour of the day. Replacing the current natural gas with renewable options will help the municipality to reduce the overall emissions further. Urbanization, globalization and vehicle electrification will all impact the future electricity demand. However, the existing plans and strategies must be revised in order to support the electrification further. The planned renewable electricity production for the future will be insufficient to cover the futuristic electricity consumption. Moreover, the analysis shows that the electricity supply will not be the major issue, instead some of the upcoming challenges will be to ensure a secure power supply to cope with the increased amount of simultaneous charging and deal with the intermittency in a smart and integrated way. Future work and research involve integration between renewable electricity production, storage solutions with batteries in electric vehicles and grid.