A new paradigm of maximizing the renewable penetration by integrating battery transportation and logistics: preliminary feasibility study

Traditional power system is gradually unable to meet the requirements of high share consumption of intermittent renewables and real-time charging pressures from increasing electric vehicles (EVs), unless costly long-distance transmission lines are constructed and large-scale grid infrastructures are upgraded. Also, equally important, existing EV practice requires long charging time and it does not resolve the ultimate goal of reducing greenhouse emissions. It simply relocates the pollution caused by cars to the pollution caused by the fossil fuel power plants. To fundamentally solve the above issues, this paper proposes a new approach, called Battery Transportation and Logistics (BTL), to compliment the transmission based power system. This aims at maximizing the penetration of renewable energy by integrating both the traditional "transmission based power flow" and the proposed "transportation based logistic flow". It is based on transporting renewable energy stored in the batteries, and the battery logistics to distribute the fully charged batteries to the end users, instead of only transmitting green electricity through the traditional power grid infrastructure. Using data from China, the technical and economical feasibilities of the proposed method are analyzed. The preliminary results look promising and provide a roadmap to encourage further researches.