Assessment of the environmental impact of dynamic inductive charging compared to conductive charging

Abstract:

The transition of the transportation sector to low-emission technologies is crucial for achieving climate targets in Germany. An important aspect of this transition is the development of an ap-propriate charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs) to support sustainable mobility. This thesis investigates the greenhouse gas (GHG) relevance of a dynamic wireless power transfer (DWPT) technology compared to a conventional plug-in charging infrastructure using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the GWP100 impact category.

Three main research questions are addressed:

(1) How can the life cycle environmental impact of DWPT infrastructure be assessed compared to the most common charging infrastructure currently in use? 

(2) In terms of a LCA, how can the two selected charging infrastructures be modeled for the use case of long-haul electric trucks? 

(3) What is the life cycle environmental impact of the two selected charging infrastructures? And what are the main scenario-based contributors? 

The LCA results show that for both DWPT and plug-in charging infrastructure, the use stage ac-counts for the majority of the environmental impacts. This is consistent with literature values. In the case of DWPT, up to 99.99 % of the environmental impact is attributed to the use stage, while for plug-in charging it is up to 99.43 %. The production and installation stages of the plug-in in-frastructure have a higher impact than those of the DWPT, while the DWPT infrastructure has a slightly higher energy consumption in the use stage due to its lower efficiency.

A sensitivity analysis indicates that the increasing share of renewable energy in the electricity mix could significantly reduce the impact of the use stage in the future, regardless of the charging method. Overall, the two infrastructures have similar GHG impacts, mainly driven by the use stage. However, the DWPT infrastructure may offer future advantages, particularly through the potential reduction in EV battery capacity, leading to resource and cost savings.

The findings highlight that the results are highly dependent on the defined system boundaries and use stage. One of the most influential variables is the utilization of the infrastructure. Future research could explore additional hotspots and scenarios to gain a better understanding of envi-ronmental impacts. In particular, the analysis of costs and the recycling potential of materials used could have a significant influence on the evaluation of DWPT technology.