| dc.description.abstract | The transportation sector has a significant share of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and to be able to achieve the 2 degree Celsius target set by the Paris Agreement, policy strategies must be implemented on a national- and international level to reduce emissions from this sector. One promising technology to reduce direct GHG emissions from the transportation sector, is the implementation of electrical supply systems for vehicles.
Life cycle assessment (LCA), is a formalized tool for evaluating the environmental impacts during the whole life cycle of a product and system, and thus, a greater holistic understanding can be granted. Additionally, the increased understanding can potentially be used as a part of policy decisions for the future.
During this thesis, an LCA of two different electrical supply systems, namely overhead contact line system and ground-level supply system, with corresponding electrical heavy duty vehicles (HDV). In total thirteen different impact categories were evaluated, and the analysis has been performed based on a reference case on an internal combustion engine (ICE) HDV. This was set up as an approach to evaluate the potential for reducing emissions by electrifying the heavy duty vehicle sector. Through the analysis, an attempt was made to cover the most relevant life cycle phases for the different systems, of which construction and maintenance was covered for the electrical systems, and construction, operation & maintenance, and disposal were covered for the HDVs. In addition, several sensitivities and scenario modelling was performed to evaluate the potential reduction of global warming potential (GWP) by e.g. applying different electricity mix, and use of higher share of secondary materials of copper and aluminum.
The main findings during this work, was that the OCL system was lower on all impact categories compared to the GLS system, and the OCL was found to have about half the GWP impacts related to the GLS system. For the corresponding electrical vehicles, the impacts was almost equal, and they had lower impacts on several impact categories compared to the ICE HDV. However, the BE HDV, also performed worse on several toxicity categories.
Based on scenarios related to the possibility of implementing the systems in the future, it was found that by constructing an electrical power supply system, it is required to utilize the system for a longer period, to gain a reduction potential. However, it is also shown that this is highly dependent on electricity mix. Additionally, by following the target of low carbon society in 2050, this solution can be a potential way of reducing CO2-emissions in the transport sector. | en |
