Impacts of Electric Carsharing on a Power Sector with Variable Renewables

Abstract

Electrifying the car fleet is a major strategy for mitigating emissions in the transport sector. As electrification cannot solve all negative externalities associated with cars, reducing the size of the car fleet would be beneficial. Electric carsharing could reconcile current car usage habits with a smaller fleet, but this may reduce the potential of electric cars to align their grid interactions with variable renewable electricity generation. We investigate how electric carsharing may impact the power sector by combining three methods: sequence clustering of car travel diaries, generation of synthetic electric vehicle time series, and power sector modeling. We show that switching to electric carsharing only moderately increases power sector costs—less than 110 euros per substituted car in our main setting. This effect is largest with bidirectional charging. We conclude that the power sector interactions of shared electric car fleets could still be aligned with variable renewable electricity generation.