Life cycle impact assessment of electric vehicle battery charging in European Union countries

Abstract

Energy production is highly diversified across Europe in terms of the energy sources. It leads to diversified environmental impacts of electric vehicles (EV) in European countries. The paper presents life cycle assessment (LCA) on EV battery charging in all the European Union (EU) countries. The analysis builds on the current and the projected structure of electricity production in 28 EU countries for period 2015-2050. The methodological approach "from cradle to gate" was used for the analysis. The computational LCA model was provided by the SimaPro v. 8.5 packages with the Ecoinvent v. 3 database. The function unit of the system was the amount of electricity in the power grid to charge an electric battery of a passenger car assuming a distance of 100 km and consumption 19.9 kWh/100 km. Three methods were used: method of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Recipe and water footprint assessment. There was provided a multidimensional environmental assessment in impact categories: greenhouse gas emission (GHG), human health (HH), ecosystem quality (EQ), resources depletion (RD), and cumulative water use (CWU). The main determinants for all the studied environmental indicators were shown solids, natural gas and biomass consumption. For 2015, the results showed that EV battery charging had the lowest environmental impact for France which had lowest indicator values on 4 from 5 categories: GHG emission (1765.52), HH (0.09), EQ (0.06), RD (0.06). The lowest CWU value was recorded for Denmark (0.02) while the highest impact on CWU was in Austria (0.11). In view of future perspective to 2050, all the analyzed environmental indicators for EV battery charging are decreasing in most EU countries. It is mainly due to the decline in the share of solids used for electricity production in the EU countries. The analysis of the impact of renewable energy sources (RES) used to generate electricity for EV battery charging showed that the most eco-friendly energy source is wind.