Synopsis

The main objective of the joint project City2.e is the development of electro mobility concepts for inner-city car owners (lantern parkers). New solutions are available for the public and private sectors. The focus is on semi-public charging infrastructure and its preferred use by lantern parkers .For lantern parkers, whose mobility behavior is a substitution of the owner-bound motorized individual traffic, the potentials of multimodal mobility solutions are to be investigated.

Description:

The research is divided in work packages to address different aspects of the topic of inner-city charging infrastructure.

The results of the work package regarding user and acceptance analysis emphasize that multimodal mobility dominates in dense urban areas. This shows a potential for alternative mobility solutions without owning car. The analysis demonstrates that cars play a limited role in daily multimodal mobility. Another interesting result is the heterogeneity of “Laternenparker” regarding their use of cars. The “Laternenparker” can be differentiated according to their willingness to keep an own car and to reduce the frequency of use in favor of alternative transport modes. There are four groups:

• Depending users” – who are ready to live without an own car, but who are under personal situation (work, family, etc.) dependent of their cars
• “Keepers” – who are ready to live without an own car, under the condition that alternative transport service offers for transporting goods within the city and for trips to the outskirts will be improved
• “Optional users” – who are not ready to live without an own car. With an improvement of alternative transport offers they would be willing to reduce their car´s use.
• “Prioritizers” – who use their own cars without considering the possibility of using other transport modes. They are not ready to give up their own car.

Furthermore, during the project the vision of ‘charging islands’, which concentrate multiple charging points in a modular building structure, was developed during a concept phase. The idea behind is a modular, multi-purpose construction, which combines a charging station with multiple charging points and with other urban applications like e.g. a bicycle station, a kiosk or a public WC. One advantage is the integration of technical equipment (like photovoltaic) within the roof or floor.

In another part of the project, a smart combination of information and communication technologies was used to simulate how electric cars can be integrated into the electric grid while ensuring optimum mobility. The total system considered as part of City2.e consisted of a simulation of the mobility network and the electric grid in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin and simulated electric cars that were simultaneously integrated into both networks. Two real, bidirectionally chargeable electric cars were also connected to the simulated system. The mobility network comprised the intermodal mobility platform CieMP (Connected Integrated E Mob Platform) and a simulated fleet that illustrated the real traffic situation and vehicle movements. The grid was represented by the smart grid simulation of the distribution network at a street level.

The model gained by this is used for modelling and visualization of the urban charging infrastructure for electro mobility and its market penetration. Macroeconomic trend models for population, economic and energy price development are used for configuration and prognosis. Based on technological evolution, costs are defined in combination with user behaviour, social milieu and transportation profiles to identify the prospective electro vehicle equipment per household. With this information first estimations of reducing CO2 emission, NOx, PM10 or noise over time are possible.

The results show that e-cars will have a small contribution in reducing emissions due to their low market share, predicted at 5%. The e-cars’ relative ecological performance is already slightly better than that of conventional combustion cars under current local conditions (2012 data). This relative performance difference will spread significantly more with time. For GHG-emissions over the complete life cycle, a reduction of 30-40% can be expected in 2030, depending on the charging infrastructure and charging management. The higher share of renewable energy in the German electricity grid mix in 2030 has the highest contribution to this improvement. Smart charging with ecologically optimized charging management can contribute approximately 7% to this. Smart charging with economically optimized charging management still results in a significant GHG-emission reduction. Ecologically optimized bidirectional charging can approximately add another 3% GHG reduction. But unregulated, bidirectional charging in economically optimized charging mode can cause significantly higher GHG emissions.