Zichuan
OUR BRIEF
Our teams aims to design a plan for the facilitation of a large scale changeover from motor mobility to electric mobility in Singapore, with our sights set on 30% of private vehicles making the switch, across the next four years.
Singapore is a densely populated country with high amounts of motor vehicle transport across a small land area, so you can imagine the levels of pollution created, which causes damage to the environment and the health of Singaporean citizens. Also, what's fueling all this motor transport? It's almost exclusively coming from those non renewable fossil fuels. That's an unsustainable energy model.
Our objective is to promote the use electric vehicles among private car users, by improving the charging station infrastructure, as well as attempting to target some of the limitations of the vehicles that make e-mobility unpopular. But fundamentally, we aim to solve the "sustainability problem" by generating energy at the charging stations from renewable energy sources.
PROBLEM
A country as vibrant and technologically lively as Singapore must constantly ask themselves one question; where is all our energy coming from? And more fundamentally, is it "sustainable"?
So what does "sustainable energy " mean to a critic of Singapore's energy usage. Well, sustainability can be defined as meeting today's demand without compromising on the future. So for Singapore it means fueling today's activity, but without using up nonrenewable resources, without jeopardising on the health of Singaporeans in this generation or the next, and without causing irrevocable damage to the environment.
On a more specific level, our task is to focus on targeting sustainability in the area of transport. Needless to say, if a country is guilty of an unsustainable energy model, one of the biggest culprits will be motor vehicle users.
Singapore hosts over half a million private vehicles, which average a mileage of between ten and fifteen thousand miles a year, and the energy to fuel that has to come from somewhere. As things stands, almost all of the fuel is coming from petrol, which is obviously non-renewable, and produces all those emissions that we want to minimise.
And why is this a problem? Well, we can divide that into two - immediate problems and projected problems. First, immediate problems. When you have so much fossil fuel consumption, (especially across such a small space - Singapore is little more than 700 square km), you are faced with high levels of pollution. The sheer volume of the emissions, combined with the density of it makes the air in Singapore very unhealthy to breath. Next problem - economic stability. Where does Singapore get all it's petrol from? It's not coming from Singapore, that's for sure. 100% of petrol consumed by Singapore is imported. That makes Singapore very dependent on other countries. What happens if the exporters decide to suddenly raise the price, or worse, refuse to supply. It spells social, political and economic disaster for Singapore. So finding a way of generating their own fuel source would make their economic position far less precarious, affording Singapore a significant stability.
How about the problems in the future? Firstly, how long can this go on for. Fossil fuels are a non-renewable energy source - once it's gone it's gone. So maybe Singapore can meet it's energy demands now, but when oil starts to become more and more scarce they must be ready to start using alternative energy. The preparation for that has to start now, by the time the resources start running out it will be too late. And finally, there's the global perspective. What does this high scale usage of petroleum do to our environment. Damage to the ozone layer and global warming are warning to us, that we must find a way of protecting our environment, and Singapore is no exception to that.
Our challenge is to look into the promotion of e-mobility - the use of electric vehicles. We are looking design an infrastructure that places the charging stations for the electric cars in a way that makes charging up easy and convenient for a wider sector of Singapore society. It is important for us to also address aspects of e-vehicles that make them unattractive to users, such as the inconvenience of having the car out of action during charging time.
But perhaps most importantly, the electricity that fuels the cars has to be generated somewhere, and if that doesn't come from a renewable source we haven't solved the problem, we've simply moved it. So we must devise a way of producing energy to fuel the charging stations from alternative energy sources in a way that meets the criteria that are delineated below.
Evaluation Criteria
EVALUATION CRITERIA
SUSTAINABILITY
Sustainable energy is the provision of energy that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their needs. For people in Singapore, the sustainable energy means fresher air, less damage to the environment, an energy source that isn't at risk of running out anytime soon, and energy provisions independent of other countries.
LOCATION
We must evaluate whether the charging stations are well located for convenient use of electric vehicle drivers. This includes ensuring that the stations are well dispersed and specific local data is taken into account - in other words, the areas where e-mobility is more prevalent there is a higher availability of charging stations. Also important that the stations are positioned in line with the technology being implemented to fuel them. If we are using solar energy, for example, the stations must be placed in a places where their exposure to sunlight radiation is maximised.
FEASIBILITY
It is critical to bare in mind that even if a renewable energy technology is scientifically 'airtight', it may not work in practise. We must always take into account the importance of ensuring that the technology is practically feasible. This includes running tests, or finding other areas countries where the same solution was provided for a similar problem, and applying critical analysis to see if the theory of the technology can be successfully implemented in Singapore.
EFFICIENCY
For different technologies, different types of efficiency are important. For example, when efficiency in context of solar energy doesn't meet not wasting any of the resource - the sunlight radiation is coming our way anyway. But it does mean not wasting space - Singapore is country with very little land space relative to its population, so it is important that we can get as much output from any given area of solar panels as possible so as to maximise the usage of the space available.
COST
Obviously, any new scheme involving renewable energies must be priced competitively, otherwise what pulls consumers away from the system they have been using until now? If a person can get a far superior vehicle for his money outside of the electric car sector he likely to opt for that. So costs must be kept down across the board, including prices of the vehicles, maintenance and charging for private owners, and the cost of building and running the charging stations for the government of Singapore.
Need
NEED ANALYSIS
Who?
Our stakeholders are predominantly electric cars owners in Singapore, both current and prospective ones. It's likely that those targeted are the more affluent end of the socio-economic spectrum, as electric cars are fairly expensive. Perhaps the public transport space can also be attacked, if electric buses and trams can be successfully created.
What?
Essentially we are looking to design an infrastructure to facilitate the widespread use of electric vehicles in an environmentally friendly way. This includes improving the cars, and the availability and usability of charging stations, as well as generating the energy from renewable sources.
When?
The Singapore government, together with environmental and transport ministries have set a target of replacing 30% of private motor vehicles with electric vehicles over the next four years.
Where?
Charging stations must be sensibly dispersed to facilitate as wide a usage as possible. It seems logical that as the switch-over happens, well located petrol stations can be rebuilt into charging stations. Some areas may need more charging station availability than other. For example, wealthy areas are likely to require more stations than those of the lower classes.
Research
ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Figure 1. The energy consumption trends (from 1971 to 2011) (Singapore energy report. 2013).
Where does the oil and gas that is used in Singapore come form?
It is exclusively imported from other countries (Singapore energy report. 2013). This makes SIngapore completely dependent on other countries for a vast majority of their energy. That's a precarious position to be in, because it means any changes oil price worldwide are likely to affect the Singapore economy in a major way (Chew. 2010).
Research
ELECTRICITY
In terms of electricity, the percentage of biomass used to generate electricity is a little bit higher than that in the total consumption (3% compared to 1%).
Figure 2. The pie chart which tells the proportion of energy used to generate electricity (Singapore energy report. 2013)
This means that the process of generating electricity for electric cars is not environmentally friendly, because burning natural gas and oil will increase the amount of CO2 emission which will cause global warming (Sims et,at.2003).
Research
RENEWABLE ENERGY
It is important to look at the efficiency of various types of alternative energy. In general, as things stand, the transfer efficiency of renewable energy is lower than that of fossil fuel (King and Wettergren.2011).
Figure 4. The efficiency of various types of PV solar cell (King and Wettergren.2011).
Figure 5. The transfer efficiency of different energy sources.( King and Wettergren.2011).
Table 1 shows how the efficiency of PV cells (solar) vary depending on the structure and material used. Table 2 compares the transfer efficiency of different types of energy.It is worth noting that the transfer efficiency of fossil fuels heads that list.
If we find the efficiency of a renewable source to be lower than what we had hoped for, we might have write it off as option.
In terms of public responses to renewable energy, Ipsos (commissioned by Shell Singapore) did a survey which covered 401 Singapore citizens(2013). It seems that this energy issue is something that is a concern that many Singaporeans consider very important.The exact percentage is shown in the diagram below:
Figure 6: The response to question: How important do you feel it is to reduce CO2 emission (Ipsos.2013).
Regarding to the question “which method of power generation is the cleanest” about 80% of Singapore citizens choose renewable energy.
Figure 7. The response to question: “Which way of power generation is the cleanest?”(Ipsos.2013)
Figure 8. The response to question: “What factors do you consider when choosing the type of fuel for your vehicle”
In addition, we find that roughly the same amount of people in Singapore will take into account how environmentally friendly the vehicle they are purchasing is to roughly as the amount considering if they are getting the best car for their money. This which shows that environmentally friendly driving is on the minds of Singaporeans in general.
Research
CHARGING STATIONS
Our challenge involves us looking at the current infrastructure of electric vehicle charging stations in Singapore, and thinking about how we can improve it to facilitate a larger volume of e-mobility.
The map below shows the location of electric cars charging station in Singapore. The charging stations are shown by red and green spots. It can be observed from the map that although there are already a number of charging stations in Singapore, they are highly concentrated in the south.
Stations are quite disperse in the north-west of Singapore, which makes e-mobility more difficult for car owners in that area. According to Annex (2010), the average distance of each journey in Singapore is about 55 kilometers which is shorter than the maximum distance of electric car can drive. The time taken to charge an electric car is about 7-8 hours and this highlights the importance of building a network of charging station in order to serve E-car drivers.
Figure 9. The distribution electric car charging stations in Singapore (http://chargenow.greenlots.com/#network-map).
References
- Chew, K.C. (2010), ‘Singapore’s strategies towards sustainable construction’, Civil and structural engineering, vol3(3).pp.196-202.
- Ipsos. (2013) ‘Future energy survey 2013 Singapore’, Available at: http://s05.static-shell.com/content/dam/shell-new/local/country/sgp/downloads/pdf/shell-singapore-future-of-energy-survey-2013.pdf (Accessed: 14 October 2015).
- King, S. and Wettergren, P. (2011) ‘Feasibility study of renewable energy in Singapore’, KTH industrial engineering and management.
- Sims, R.E.H., Rogner, H.H. and Gregory, K. (2003) ‘Carbon emission and mitigation cost comparisons between fossil fuel, nuclear and renewable energy resources for electricity generation’, Energy policy, 32, pp.1315-1326.
- Singapore energy report (2013) Available at: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/ehost/command/detail?sid=89b2d444-cd59-4c58-a769-1f38eaabef42%40sessionmgr112&vid=3&hid=115&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLHNoaWImc2l0ZT1laG9zdC1saXZlJnNjb3BlPXNpdGU%3d#jid=B5BU&db=bth. (Assessed:14 October 2015).
- http://chargenow.greenlots.com/#network-map
- http://www.lta.gov.sg/data/apps/news/press/2010/EV%20Factsheet%20.pdf