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Creating a Successful Plan to Electrify Transportation Infrastructure

Blog

Creating a Successful Plan to Electrify Transportation Infrastructure

Feb 08, 2023

Transport is the largest single contributor to global carbon emissions. In 2020, that sector accounted for 27% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A global movement is underway to help the world avoid the worst impacts of climate change by building new, decentralized, and decarbonized transportation infrastructure, which will require $50 trillion of investment globally by 2040, says the Global Infrastructure Outlook, which is published by Sydneybased Global Infrastructure Hub, an infrastructure research not-for-profit firm. Recent U.S. infrastructure legislation and the EU’s European Green Deal have allocated $3 trillion and €1 trillion, respectively, for vital infrastructure investments to aid this transition. But executing and sustaining the ambitious goals of these infrastructure programs will fall to local authorities.

Such responsibility puts a tremendous weight on local officials in light of what’s at stake when it comes to achieving green infrastructure goals and securing the available funds.

As a result, local authorities need help developing plans that align with policies that have already been set. Indeed, even with access to available funding, knowing how and where to begin moving from outdated carbon-emitting energy systems to low-carbon alternatives can be a daunting prospect. 

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Knowing how and where  to begin moving from outdated carbon-emitting energy systems to low-carbon alternatives can be a daunting prospect.

Local transportation and government authorities likely will have to build their own “must do” checklists to create the mobility and transportation infrastructure of tomorrow. This task will require some internal fact-finding, followed by identifying cost-efficient electrification and decarbonization transportation solutions and ongoing funding sources.  Local officials may need to seek help from private-sector partners and consultants and to enlist transportation operators and other stakeholders in educating and engaging the public on how a green energy transportation plan aligns with community interests, as well as health, economic, and societal priorities.

Many times, that priority list requires outside help, says Rafael Aldrete, PhD, the senior research scientist at Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute in College Station, Texas. “Unfortunately, municipalities don’t often get that opportunity or training to implement green projects,” he explains. “The analyst or consultant has helped other agencies implement or plan similar projects. They know what the potential issues are and can provide the agency with information to make a plan much better.”

This report examines the responsibilities that sustainable infrastructure programs will bestow on local transportation and government officials and the approaches they can take to fulfill those responsibilities. It also establishes best practices for executing the net-zero carbon and other  goals set for future transportation investment, including drawing on outside resources such as consultants and community stakeholders. 

Auditing a Municipality’s Energy Use

In order to achieve a net-zero future, governments are deploying and using renewable energy for a variety of reasons, such as reducing local air pollution, advancing local economic development, lowering operational costs, improving energy access, and bettering the health and well-being of citizens. Overseeing the energy supply and driving the transition to renewables has traditionally fallen under the purview of national governments, which are responsible for national energy policy.

Executing low-carbon transportation infrastructure plans, however, will primarily fall to local authorities, among others, and transportation and e-mobility revamps are among the key components of these climate change initiatives they’ll have to tackle first. Since the money will be distributed to state and local governments, they will also have responsibility for how to best use the funds to achieve clean energy goals.

Whether the plan is for enhanced public transportation, electric vehicles, airports, ports, or railway networks, a successful implementation of any future plan starts with a thorough assessment and understanding of the current landscape—which can best be performed by the local authorities who are most familiar with the current platform. Annie Hudson, assistant director at the MIT Mobility Initiative in Cambridge, Mass., says these officials should begin the process by conducting a technical evaluation or audit of the performance of the current platform and how it can be improved to include more green energy.

Transportation experts interviewed for this paper say a local authority tasked with executing the sustainability goals of the infrastructure build-out should start by gathering data about a municipality’s energy use, including any planned energy efficiency improvements, to project future demand based on anticipated population growth and expanding economic activity. Local officials then must answer other questions, such as these: What fuels and equipment is the municipality currently using? What are the demands and behavioral patterns of end users? Are there suppressed demands within the community because energy sources aren’t able to meet demand? What about affordability? Are there instances when residents are unable to afford the energy they need? Are there specific resources that will improve quality of life for the community? 

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Mapping Out the Future 

At the conclusion of this fact-finding, local officials will need to map out different scenarios and various renewable energy combinations and growth rates. Lori Bird, director of the U.S. Energy Program and the Polsky Chair for Renewable Energy at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a nonprofit global environmental think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., says it is important to keep in mind that the types of resources available—wind, solar, geothermal—will vary greatly depending on geography and suppliers. “Cities that are served by a regulated utility will have limited clean energy offerings and less ability to negotiate than in a competitive electricity market,” says Bird. 

Most communities are served by a single regulated utility, with technology and don’t have any background to address which limits the options for obtaining energy resources. “It is likely that some supply will need to be imported from neighboring municipalities, smaller cities, and the wider region,” says the MIT Mobility Initiative’s Hudson. “The build-out of renewables should be approached as a regional issue and planned in collaboration with regional partners in a way that takes technical capacity, financial viability, and regulatory barriers into consideration.”

This wider geographic scope means that local authorities must analyze things like existing grid capacity to determine how particular assets and resources fit into the broader regional and state picture and overarching goals, according to Hudson.

Of course, every infrastructure project needs a realistic timeline that takes hiccups into account, says WRI’s Bird. “The time frame depends on the type of project and the region,” she explains. “We’ve seen delays or challenges caused by things like issuing and getting responses to RFPs [requests for proposal], contract negotiations with suppliers, and failing to factor in additional costs.”

Texas A&M’s Aldrete advises clients to expect snafus in procurement, particularly when it involves new and emerging technologies. “All of this available infrastructure money has created a huge demand for electric vehicles [EV], but the market may not be able to provide enough vehicles to meet that demand soon enough,” he says. “If you’re not familiar with technology and don’t have any background to address those characteristics, you may need to consider going small.” 

Electrification Is the Essential Component

Once local officials have evaluated their energy capacity needs, they can set firm low-carbon transportation and mobility goals and chart a plan to get there, keeping in mind that the most obvious path may not be the best one. For example, if a municipality’s end goal is reducing pollution and vehicle emissions, building a comprehensive EV charging system may seem like the obvious solution. On closer inspection, however, such an ambition might not be feasible.

“Most municipalities are part of the bigger state and federal plan, so it doesn’t make much sense to build out a robust charging infrastructure if there isn’t a larger corridor infrastructure to connect to,” says Hudson. “Instead of building out ideas in a vacuum, local municipalities should consider filling in the gaps left by national governments. If your state or region isn’t building out charging stations for EV, expanding other alternative modes of transportation like bike lanes may be a better investment of resources.”

Almost 88% of the 2,800 industry executives surveyed for Deloitte’s “Energy Transition Trends Report 2022” identified  electrification as key to unlocking and accelerating the clean energy transition. This finding appears to be the prevailing view on both sides of the Atlantic. Electrification is a large part of the U.S. infrastructure law and the European Green Deal. In Europe, the deployment of fully electric buses increased from a 5% sales share in 2016 to 10% in 2021, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT). The Netherlands has pledged to convert its entire bus fleet to zeroemission as early as 2030, and, on the city level, Amsterdam and Copenhagen are planning for a fully zero-emission bus f leet by as early as 2025. Just one month after the EU proposed to eliminate all carbon-emitting cars and vans by 2035, the United States unveiled its plan to ensure that electric vehicles account for 50% of all vehicle sales by 2030. These are clear indicators that electrification is the future of global mobility.

In reality, however, there aren’t nearly enough charging stations to support these electric vehicles.

Both the infrastructure law and the Green Deal take these shortcomings into account and offer plans and incentives to help local entities connect to a much broader network of charging stations to meet the expected growth in demand. The infrastructure law, for example, also addresses very real concerns about the location of stations, costs, connectivity, and reliability, particularly in areas where daily driving distances are long and people lack dedicated parking spaces at home or at work. But taking advantage of this unique opportunity depends on local authorities’ ability to secure and use available funds to effectively advance their clean energy transformation goals. 

Conclusion

The growing global consensus around the threats posed by climate change has brought many nations together to find and fund workable solutions, particularly in the transportation sector. As regional and local government authorities become more central to leading the way on carbon reduction, they will be required to take on many more responsibilities. They must be fact finders when it comes to evaluating their communities’ energy and transportation needs and how low-carbon mobility and transportation infrastructure can help meet them. They will also have to enlist outside help from consultants, private-sector partners, and stakeholders such as utilities and the public itself. Outside expertise will help identify and implement the decentralized and decarbonized transportation infrastructure required to build the green energy city of the future. “A good practice would be to let everyone know early on about the commitment to become greener and be as energy efficient as possible,” says Aldrete. “That provides an opportunity to make the public aware so that by the time that money becomes available, the community is already aware of where things are heading.” 


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This post originally appeared in Schneider Electric blog (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://download.schneider-electric.com/files?p_Doc_Ref=998-22361411), and is re-published with permission.

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