Larger Transport Electrification May Reduce Europe’s Import Dependency By Practically A Quarter By 2040

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Europe is about to determine what its renewable power framework ought to appear to be for the last decade after 2030. For transport, the political query is easy: Does Europe need to preserve relying on imported oil and fossil fuels or does it need its transport system to rely extra on European electrical energy?

For too lengthy, the EU’s Renewable Vitality Directive has handled transport decarbonisation as a query of gasoline substitution. In different phrases, how a lot petrol and diesel might be changed by various fuels resembling biofuels or e-fuels? However the cleanest and easiest gasoline isn’t a gasoline in any respect. It’s electrical energy.

Electrification does one thing no liquid gasoline can do. It cuts the quantity of power wanted in transport within the first place, because of its power effectivity features. For this reason prioritising direct electrification is each a local weather and an power safety coverage measure.

In a world the place power safety has returned to the highest of the political agenda, decreasing power demand and prioritising Europe’s power autonomy needs to be on the coronary heart of political negotiations. Avoiding imported barrels of oil, reducing fossil and unsustainable gasoline imports and prioritising home electrical energy manufacturing needs to be a central goal.

In our newest research, we present that the following renewable power transport goal will rely closely on whether or not the EU defends the insurance policies that drive street electrification, particularly the automobile CO₂ requirements. The mannequin seems to be at totally different legislative electrification pathways within the EU. The outcomes are clear. Weakening automobile CO₂ requirements would permit an analogous headline RES goal to be reached, however solely by means of a lot better reliance on scarce and imported various fuels.

Electrical energy can do the heavy lifting within the RES-T goal whereas scarce, sustainably sourced fuels are reserved for sectors that want them most, resembling aviation and delivery. A high-electrification pathway would additionally deliver EU transport’s 2040 import dependency down by practically 1 / 4 from at the moment’s degree, round 15% decrease than underneath low-electrification pathways. In contrast, a weaker electrification pathway for vehicles would do the other.

For policymakers, the lesson is easy: the 2040 renewable power transport goal should be paired with formidable electrification measures and a correspondingly larger contribution from renewable electrical energy.

In any other case Europe can be counting on risky imports for longer.

By Marion Revest, T&E