In the next years, an increasing number of Australians will purchase an electric car, and a firm called IonBlue has now made it feasible to assure that the electricity used to power these EVs is obtained from renewable energy, Tech Guide writes.
In 2021, 24,078 EVs were sold in Australia, with demand expected to climb by 200 percent in 2022, due in part to state government incentive programs.
Although electric vehicles emit no pollutants, they require power to replenish the onboard battery.
And not everyone who has or plans to buy an EV has solar panels and batteries to gather renewable energy to charge it.
The majority of charging occurs at night on the owner’s driveway, using power supplied by the energy grid, which contributes to carbon emissions.
IonBlue, an Australian start-up, offers a service that allows EV users to charge their vehicles using renewable, carbon-neutral electricity.
According to Mathew Gaal, the founder of IonBlue, the purpose is to raise awareness about how people presently use electric vehicles and how the firm can enhance this use to better help the renewable energy industry.
Although electric vehicles are a tremendous technical achievement, their environmental footprint, when considering the vehicle’s end-to-end lifetime and charging processes, is not considerably better than that of a regular combustion engine vehicle, he argues.
The firm wants to alter that, and its environmental subscription service is simple to use, requires little work, and is inexpensive.
IonBlue’s service includes the provision of Renewable Energy Certificates (REC), which are acquired as part of a customer’s subscription to offset the amount of electricity required by your car.
The RECs are obtained from the Molong Renewable Energy Generator in rural NSW, which is a Clean Energy Regulator-registered facility.
Molong is a 30MWac Solar Farm in central west NSW, north-west of Orange, that will provide enough electricity to power around 8,500 ordinary NSW households once finished.
RECs are sold in entire units, with one megawatt hour equaling 1,000 KWh of clean energy.
IonBlue offers options ranging from $5 per month ($60 per year) to $35 per month ($420 per year) to meet the various demands of EV drivers and the kind and number of vehicles they own.
The business already has a database of all EVs on the market and has assessed the amount and cost of energy required per kilometer.
IonBlue can compute the grid electricity you will consume each year based on your yearly trip and location in megawatt hours of electricity generated by authorized renewable energy sources such as wind or solar.