E-Vehicles: A blessing in disguise for thermal power, especially coal?

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India is on a cusp of a revolutionary change in the automobile landscape which will shape the demand for electricity in more ways than one in future.

As battery powered vehicles replace oil ones in the next two decades or so, the demand for electricity will surge immensely. Will renewables alone find the power to fuel those vehicles, or do we also need conventional sources to tackle this?

The Paris agreement to which India is a signatory mandates the country to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to keep the global average temperatures from rising above 1.5°C. This and the growing concerns for a cleaner environment may have resulted in the government pushing the fifth gear for electric vehicles.

It is firmly believed that electric vehicles charged with electricity from renewable sources such as solar energy can bring down the emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants while enhancing a decarbonised transport system.

As per Coal Vision 2030 document, a study commissioned by Coal India, electricity vehicles can result in an incremental demand for power of nearly 160 billion units (bKWh) by 2030. The flipside of such high demand is that it will work positively for coal-operated power sector unless renewables don’t take deep root by then.

World Economic Forum has also documented that India will have an all-electric fleet by 2030. Piyush Goyal, who was earlier Minister of State for Power, Coal, New and Renewable Energy, had said that India will have only electric vehicles by then. Inference perhaps was that the production of petrol and diesel vehicles will most likely be discontinued thereafter.

Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers in its December 2017 report titled Adopting Pure Electric Vehicles: Key Policy Enablers has stated that 40% of new vehicle sales in the country will be purely electric vehicles by 2030. The report specifies that 60% of the new vehicle sales in the country will have greener technologies such as hybrids and other alternative fuels.

So how do we charge these battery driven vehicles and through which source?

“This is an important question which we tend to either overlook or haven’t taken into consideration. You need base load to keep the batteries running and this can come only from conventional sources such as coal as how the situation currently is,” a sector analyst said.

“You need to keep the electric car plugged in the whole night and this is likely to increase power consumption by 50% or more resulting in peak electricity demand jump. It is undeniable that vehicle owners will be plugging in the evenings or at night as in day time they would use it for other purposes. Every time a vehicle goes to power up it will have to depend on coal power more often than not since renewables won’t work in the night.”

Industry sources point out that this will also reverse the trend for falling demand for electricity which ails the power sector often. Power sector will no longer be bogged down for lack of demand. Upticks in power sale will boost the financial prospects of stressed projects in power sector.

E-vehicles are still at a nascent stage in India with an estimated 4 lakh electric two-wheelers and a few thousand cars plying on the roads. However, electric vehicles have the potential to grow to more than 5% of annual vehicle sales in the coming years as per the Coal Vision 2030 document. The document also points out that the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles scheme envisages a population of 15-16 million electric vehicles in India within the next two years itself.

It is easier to charge a hundred thousand e-vehicles spread across the length and breadth of the country in 2018 but imagine the situation in 2030 when over 300 million vehicles need to be charged every day, day and night and anywhere in the country. The power these vehicles will consume needs to be generated first and this demand cannot be met by solar power or any other renewable source that easily.

As India moves forward with its e-vehicle adoption it will become important to ensure that electric cars use electricity which is produced from renewable sources of energy alone. Doing so is a challenge unless storage technologies improve tremendously.

These are challenges and how the country is bracing itself up to meet them is perhaps only a matter of time.

Also distance is a factor as the battery needs to be recharged after the vehicle travels a certain distance. Vehicle manufacturers have made significant progress in dealing with this. A recent Guardian report said about five members of a Telsa club making a claim of having traveled 670 miles on a single charge.  

 

(The author is a Delhi-based journalist. He can be reached at prasad.n@indoen.com)