Spending 60% of the EU’s key infrastructure fund on contributing to climate objectives – as proposed by the European Commission today – will ensure smarter and cleaner spending, green NGO Transport & Environment (T&E) has said. The Connecting Europe Facility would have €42.3 billion to co-finance investments including €30 billion for transport, as part of the draft 2021-2027 EU budget just published.
The average car sits unused for more than 90% of the time, carries on average just one and a half people and costs, on average, €6,500 a year to own and run. Each car occupies 150m2 of urban land and still this is not the full bill – congestion costs the EU economy €100 billion annually. The convenience that made the car a 20th century icon has been eroded by its popularity.
After many false dawns the electric car is finally on a trajectory to replace the internal combustion engine.
Electromobility is the most promising future technology to decarbonize road transport. Grid management is critical to electric vehicle adoption. Smart charging is key to minimize the amount of investments needed in the grid. Large scale deployment of EVs represents an opportunity to store large amounts of renewable electricity in batteries, reducing curtailment. EVs can even work as virtual power stations.
Despite the perception that public recharging is a major barrier to the mass uptake of electric vehicles (EV), public chargers are only used for about 5% of charging events, including on-street city charging, car parks and fast charging along road corridors. The data compiled in various studies to date shows that the vast majority of EV charging happens at home or work and it is a lack of choice and availability of electric cars that is the principal barrier.
Which comes first, electric cars or the recharging points? How to tackle this dilemma has been the subject of considerable debate. This report examines the importance and availability of public charging infrastructure and how to efficiently expand the existing network as the number of electric vehicles on the road increases.
The European Commission has announced a commitment to spending at least 60% of the EU’s cross-border infrastructure fund on schemes that help the fight against climate change. T&E has largely welcomed the announcement, though it criticised the proposal to count EU funding for gas projects towards the climate spending goals.
Europe has already spent half a billion US dollars on natural gas infrastructure for its shipping sector in order to comply with an EU law – and continuing its roll-out is likely to cost governments and investors $22 billion by 2050, a new study has found. Liquified natural gas (LNG) will reduce shipping emissions by just 6%, at most, compared to the replaced diesel fuel, the research by the UMAS consultancy shows.
A group of leading utilities, investors and NGOs have called on President Juncker to invest more money in zero-emission mobility and power generation when allocating the EU budget after 2020. Aviva Investors, 2 Degrees Investing, Eurelectric, Ocean Energy Europe, Mirova Investing, E3G, Greenway, Climate Bonds Initiative, Fastned and T&E demand future EU investment be focused on decarbonising the transport sector.
A group of leading utilities, investors and NGOs have called on President Juncker to invest more money in zero-emission mobility and power generation when allocating the EU budget after 2020. Aviva Investors, 2 Degrees Investing, Eurelectric, Ocean Energy Europe, Mirova Investing, among others, demand future EU investment be focused on decarbonising the transport sector.