On the Adoption of Rooftop Photovoltaics Integrated with Electric Vehicles Toward Sustainable Bangkok City, Thailand

Realizing urban energy systems with net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 is a major goal of global societies in building sustainable and livable cities. Developing cities hold a key to meeting this goal, as they will expand rapidly in the next decades with increasing energy demand, potentially associated with rising CO2 emissions and air pollution if fossil fuels continue to be utilized. Therefore, identifying equitable, cost-effective, and deep decarbonization pathways for developing cities is essential. Here, we analyzed Bangkok City, Thailand, using the System Advisor Model (SAM) for techno-economic analysis to evaluate the decarbonization potential of rooftop photovoltaics (PV) integrated with electric vehicles (EVs) as batteries on a city scale. The analyses took into consideration hourly local weather conditions, electricity demand, electricity tariffs, feed-in-tariffs, degradation, declining costs of PV and EV, etc., specific to Bangkok. As the prices of PV and EVs decrease over the next several decades, the “PV + EV” system may provide a basis for new urban power infrastructure with high energy efficiency, low energy cost, and large CO2 emission reduction. The results show that the “PV + EV” scenario in 2030 has the highest CO2 emission reduction of 73% from electricity and vehicle usage, supplying 71% of the electricity demand of the city. The “PV + EV” system may reduce energy costs by 59% with estimated technology costs in 2030. Most of the energy generated from rooftop PV is consumed owing to large EV battery capacities, which can contribute to the rapid decarbonization of Bangkok City by 2050.