Prospective Life Cycle Assessment of the Increased Electricity Demand Associated with the Penetration of Electric Vehicles in Spain

Abstract

The penetration of electric vehicles (EV) seems to be a forthcoming reality in the transport sector worldwide, involving significant increases in electricity demand. However, many countries such as Spain have not yet set binding policy targets in this regard. When compared to a business-as-usual situation, this work evaluates the life-cycle consequences of the increased electricity demand of the Spanish road transport technology mix until 2050. This is done by combining Life Cycle Assessment and Energy Systems Modelling under three alternative scenarios based on the low, medium, or high penetration rate of EV. In all cases, EV deployment is found to involve a relatively small percentage (<4%) of the final electricity demand. Wind power and waste-to-energy plants arise as the main technologies responsible for meeting the increased electricity demand associated with EV penetration. When considering a high market penetration (20 million EV by 2050), the highest annual impacts potentially caused by the additional electricity demand are 0.93 Mt CO 2 eq, 0.25 kDALY, and 30.34 PJ in terms of climate change, human health, and resources, respectively. Overall, EV penetration is concluded to slightly affect the national power generation sector, whereas it could dramatically reduce the life-cycle impacts associated with conventional transport.

Coupling Activity-Based Modeling and Life Cycle Assessment—A Proof-of-Concept Study on Cross-Border Commuting in Luxembourg

“…On the other hand, Cellura et al [16] confirmed an increase of resource depletion (mineral, fossil and renewable resource depletion in their case). Several authors [20,23,27,29,32] showed similar results for climate change mitigation.…”

Appending material flows to the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) for projecting the physical economy of the United States

“…In a similar manner, aggregated input–output or process‐level emissions data associated with the production of each commodity output could be appended to the NEMS model and used to project all types of environmental emissions forward in time, and to use LCIA to estimate aggregate environmental impacts. The aggregated nature of the NEMS IDM sectors makes it impractical to use these NEMS results for analyzing individual material flows associated with a specific technology, as is commonly done for metal criticality studies for new vehicle or energy generation technologies (Hertwich et al., 2015; Navas‐Anguita et al., 2018); rather, the NEMS outputs can provide the gross physical resource flows that can then be decomposed into individual goods and matched with LCI data.…”

“…(2018) used outputs from IMAGE under shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP) scenarios as inputs to a dynamic stock model to study the five metal demands toward 2050. In Spain, environmental impacts of vehicle electrification were evaluated by using ESOM results as input life cycle inventory (LCI) data in LCA (Navas‐Anguita, García‐Gusano, & Iribarren, 2018). Arvesen, Luderer, Pehl, Bodirsky, and Hertwich (2018) and Pehl et al.…”

Adjustment of the Life Cycle Inventory in Life Cycle Assessment for the Flexible Integration into Energy Systems Analysis

“…It is done mostly in the form of using the energy composition of a national grid to compose the electricity background data in LCA. Two examples are conducted in Navas-Anguita et al [54], where a LCA of induced change in the environmental systems analysis through the adoption of electric vehicles in Spain is conducted, and in Pichlmaier et al [55], where the dynamisation of LCA by the integration of ESA dynamically is described. Pichlmaier et al declare the plan to integrate LCA indicators in their ESA models.…”