Funding Organisation: German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety
Project duration: June 2008 until June 2012
Contact: Yvonne Scholz
Background: The Volkswagen AG has started a ‘fleet test electro-mobility’ in Berlin. The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety funds the project with estimated 15 million € in the scope of its ‘climate protection initiative’.
A fleet of VW plug-in hybrid cars will be tested. Plug-in Hybrids can run on electric energy as fuel and can switch to a conventional combustion engine running on gas or diesel if needed. Electric motors have a higher efficiency than combustion engines and the electricity can be generated with renewable energy from solar, wind and hydro resources. The fleet is supposed to be tested in road traffic. One main focus is on the batteries. The batteries as a distributed storage system might help to integrate large shares of electricity from intermittent renewable energies into the electricity supply system. Vehicles with electric engines might help to mitigate CO2-, air pollutant and noise emissions and thus increase quality of life in high density urban areas.
Seven other partners are involved in the project, among which are the utility E.ON and research institutes of the ‘Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’ and the German Aerospace Center.
The DLR department for Systems Analysis and Technology Assessment is a subcontractor of the ‘Institut für Energie- und Umweltforschung’. It delivers cost-potential-curves for renewable energies which are generated in the model REMix. The cost-potential-curves are used for analysing the availability of renewable energy for mobility in addition to the scheduled development of renewable energy use in other sectors. They are input to energy system models of the Institute for Industrial Production of the University of Karlsruhe and the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research.