The European Commission’s 2011 Transport White Paper sets 10 ambitious goals that are needed to be achieved in order to maintain efficient mobility links within the EU. At its core is a challenge to achieve less congestion and fewer emissions. Those two twin initiatives lie at the heart of the commitment to phase out conventionally fuelled cars from cities by 2050, or the ambition to shift 50 % in middle distance passenger and longer distance freight journeys from road to other modes by the same date, or to achieve a 60 % reduction in CO2 emissions. To paraphrase the report, the policy actions are an invitation to break the ‘shackles of transport’s dependency on oil, but without sacrificing its efficiency’.
The main flow of argument regarding the ‘impact’ of lif-E-Buoy towards the above objectives can be summarized as follows:
The cost of use over an electric vehicle’s (EV’s) lifetime is already close to being competitive against internal combustion engines (ICE’s), if all running expenses are considered. Cost parity, which is required for mass adoption is a mere few years away.
We go further and argue that the significant cost reduction in lithium based batteries as a result of the likely long term falls in the price of input component will again increase the attractiveness of EV’s.
Most significantly however, without deeper EV penetration, current fuel efficiency standards cannot be met. As a consequence, both cost and environmental considerations are firmly on EV’s side.
The main challenge for governments and policymakers in encouraging mass EV adoption will be in making sure that the infrastructure to support a shift away from ICE’s is built. Without reliable infrastructure to charge EV’s, consumers will not buy them.
Fortunately, again, we are very close to the emergence of commercially viable Charging Point (CP) networks. Typical payback periods for network operators lie in the 5-8 year range, which is now beginning to attract private sector investment from car OEM’s, electric utilities and even energy majors scrambling to shift focus away from their existing fossil based service stations.
Lif-E-Buoy recently signed a ‘Letter of Intent’ with fuel retailer MOL Group, which operates ~1,900 petrol stations across the CEE region and is intent on embracing the electric age. The potential partnership re-enforces our conviction that the lif-E-Bouy hydro generator electric vehicle charging system will become an integral part of smart city mobility solutions.
The lif-E-Buoy facility takes advantage of the natural hydrokinetic energy of running water, which is abundantly available around most urban centres situated on a river, and independent of season or weather.
The steady but predictable pace in the flow of water makes a perfect resource for slow overnight charging of stationary electric vehicles.
The lif-E-Buoy technology can also be upgraded to meet the ‘rapid charge’ requirement of taxi and bus fleets. In reality, however, most cars are stationary 95% of the time, parked on the street.
We see the main potential market for lif-E-Buoy powered charging points to be vehicles parked on the street overnight, which not only widens the appeal of EV’s for households without access to a garage (and thus home charging), but also ensures that the hydrokinetic flow of rivers running across Europe is effectively harvested
