Could the University car park provide free green transport for all staff?

The concept of turning car parking spaces into charging spots for electric vehicles is know as “carporting”. Some vehicle manufacturers are already providing these sort of facilities for their employees.

http://www.opusenergyblog.com/solar-shelters-turning-car-parks-into-carports/

If the UK is to become carbon neutral by 2030 iniatives such as these need to be put in place right now. It may seem futuristic, but the future is already here.

Just imagine how cool it would be to convert the University car park H into a large car port and provide all the staff who need to drive to work with brand new,totally carbon neutral, electric vehicles that don’t emit fumes and run mainly just on the sunlight falling directly on the place that they park up. So, just drive in to work and park under the panels. Plug in the car battery and it will charge the car up while you are at work using purely solar power. Some extra energy produced by the panels when you are not at work, or on very sunny days will be fed into the grid and/or used to make university buildings truly carbon neutral. Sounds totally impossible, right?

Could the university possibly afford to try something as mad as this? The answer is surprisingly, yes it certainly could! In fact it should be doing it right now. Here are the calculations to prove it.

Car park H

To get an idea of the available space I digitised a quick outline of car park H in order to find the area.

mapview(car_park)
a<-as.numeric(st_area(car_park))

The polygon has an area of 8049 m². Solar panels can produce about 120 watts per square meter. There are other areas of parking space available, so even if only a proportion of the area of the largest car park H is actually usable more space could be made up elsewhere. So space is certainly not a limitation.

w_sq_m<- 120
kw_sq_m <- w_sq_m/1000
mw<-w_sq_m*a/1000000

This makes the total potential power from the car park around 1 megawatts. During the time cars are parked during the day there may be an average of around 4 hours of sunlight.

hours <- 4
kwh<-kw_sq_m * hours

So each square meter of solar panel will produce around 0.48 kWh during the time the cars are parked beneath the roof and charging their batteries. This is comparable to other estimates that suggest a total output of around 200 kwh per year per meter of solar installation.

tot<-0.5*a*kwh

The total energy generated if 50% of the car park is covered with active panels is 1931.8 kWh per day.

An electric car can travel around 10 km on each kWh of energy.

nkm<-tot*10
dist_per_car<-25
ncars<-nkm/dist_per_car

So the car park could provide a remarkable 773 electric cars with totally free trips into work.

Cost

The cost of installation per square meter of solar panel is currently around 220 pounds per square meter.

cost_per_sq_m<-220
total_cost<-0.5*a*cost_per_sq_m

This makes a total cost of 0.89 million. This is really not very much at all when it is set alongside the money spent by Bournemouth University on new buildings.

However, there would be no point unless staff have electric cars. How much would it cost in total for around 1000 staff members to switch to electric cars?

The cheapest option on the market at present is the smart EG for four. https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/reviews/smart/forfour/ed/review

This costs around 20 thousand pounds. So the total cost for all staff of a sudden switch runs to around 20 million. Electric cars have a life span of at least 10 years, so this sum can be discounted over the life time. The cost of parking would be cancelled for all staff with electric vehicles, saving them at least 200 pounds.

ndays<-200
totkm<-dist_per_car * ndays
fuel_economy <- 20
price<-1.35
petrol<-totkm/fuel_economy * price

The current cost of petrol for a typical member of staff is 337.5 pounds. This also is an offset to the cost of changing to electric. Staff would also get some free additional mileage from the charging time. This would effectively make most other local journeys free. If this is not incentive enough to switch, the University could provide a tailored finance scheme in place of the current parking charges.

The car park would also provide additional energy for the buildings and other uses, especially over the summer.

The sums work out for a quick switch. However the more conservative minded would suggest providing a phased in service with one row of parking places with charging points at the beginning of the project with extensions planned according to uptake. My own instincts would be to go for a rapid transition, but the compromise would still be positive.

The concept overall really does look like a no brainer to me. What is BU waiting for?

Car park H next year?