Blog Articles 2021

Within Europe, heavy-duty vehicles are responsible for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector and therefore play a central role in achieving the climate targets set by the EU. The limited range of electric trucks requires a European public fast-charging network to enable the widespread deployment of battery solutions. To investigate the existing electrification potential, we modelled the European road freight flows based on the ETISplus dataset.

The potential of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) to reduce local pollutant and global greenhouse gas emissions strongly depends on their real-world usage and the share of kilometres driven on electricity, the so-called utility factor (UF). In the European CO2 fleet targets, generic functions for UF of PHEV are used derived from in standardized testing procedures, or test cycles, such as the Worldwide Harmonized Light-Duty Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP). We find that the current WLTP UF parameters are too optimistic about real-world UF since long-distance driving was missing in earlier estimates, actual charging is less frequent than commonly assumed and real-world all-electric ranges are lower than WLTP ranges.

Regional strategy development processes have started again in many European regions and RIS3 (Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation) are perceived as an interesting new research topic. There is a call for papers for the “Journal of entrepreneurship, management and innovation”, the submission deadline ist the 30 September 2021.