Technical feasibility assessment of electric vehicles: An Abu Dhabi example

Recently, Electric Vehicles (EVs) have gained much attention as a potential enabling technology to support CO₂ emissions reduction targets. Relative to their internal combustion vehicle counterparts, EVs consume less energy per unit distance, and add the benefit of not emitting any carbon dioxide in operation and instead shift their emissions to the existing local fleet of power generation. However, true success of EVs depends on their successful integration with the supporting infrastructure systems. Building upon the recently published methodology of the same purpose, this paper presents an systems-of-systems example assessing the impacts of EVs on these three systems in the context of Abu Dhabi. For the physical transportation system, a microscopic discrete-time traffic operations simulator is used to predict the kinematic state of the EV fleet over the duration of one day. For the impact on the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), the integration of EVs into Abu Dhabi is studied using a Multi-Domain Matrix (MDM) of the Abu Dhabi Department of Transports ITS. Finally, for the impact on the electric power system, the EV traffic flow patterns from the CMS are used to calculate the timing and magnitude of charging loads. The paper concludes with the need for an Intelligent Transportation-Energy System (ITES) which would coordinate traffic and energy management functionality.