Perspective of integrating green power with digital technology to drive the high-quality development of the automobile industry under the dual-carbon strategy

Abstract

The exploration and utilization of fossil fuels have significantly promoted the advance of human civilization. At the same time, it has also brought a series of critical challenges that pose great threats to the sustainable development of human society such as climate change, energy crisis, and environmental pollution. As one of the landmark outcomes of the era of fossil fuels, the automobile industry is so far still the dominant consumer of fossil fuels, especially petroleum resources. From the viewpoint of sustainable development, it is of great desire to explore revolutionary technologies to wean the automobile industry off fossil fuels. In addition, with the rapid development of digital technology, the automobile is increasingly becoming an important platform of the digital economy, offering unprecedented opportunities to power the development of the automobile industry. As the two most important basic technologies of the future automobile industry and the important content of new-quality productive forces, the integration of green energy power technology with digital technology is crucial to promote upgrading the automobile industry, new industrialization, and high-quality development of the economy. This integration is critical for the green transformation of the national energy structure and the achievement of dual-carbon strategic goals. This perspective introduces that under the vision of carbon neutrality, the rapid growth of renewable energies such as photovoltaic, wind, and hydropower will accelerate the transition of human society from the era of fossil fuels into the era of carbon neutrality. Of note, owing to the well-matched spatial distribution of water, carbon dioxide, biomass, N2 and renewable energies on the earth, the constant breakthrough of cutting-edge research such as artificial photosynthesis, power-to-X technologies, carbon capture utilization and storage, will make the sustainable supply of green hydrogen, e-fuel, and other renewable synthetic fuels practically promising, thus addressing the issues associated with the intermittent, fluctuant, and random characteristics of renewable energies. As a result, a promising pathway for the transformation of various power technologies such as internal combustion engines, batteries, and fuel cells toward carbon neutrality can be paved. In this perspective, the connotations and characteristics of different green power technologies based on green electricity, green hydrogen, and renewable synthetic fuels are first demonstrated along with the basic introduction of their operation principles. Then, the status, bottlenecks, application scenarios, and advances of different green power technologies are discussed in detail. Furthermore, the impact of integrating digital technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and 5th Generation Mobile Communication Technology with green power technologies on the automobile industry is expounded: (1) digital technology accelerates the design of key material for green energy technology and optimizes the energy management of a power system; (2) the establishment of a smart energy system; (3) smart car networking; (4) artificial intelligence accelerates the intelligent automobile industry upward to a new stage. At last, the possibility of integrating green power technologies with digital technologies to coordinate the development of strategic emerging industries such as large-scale energy storage, smart grid, zero-carbon aviation, zero-carbon shipping, and low-altitude equipment is briefly discussed. Overall, it shows a feasible path to take the green and low-carbon transformation of the automobile industry as a valuable opportunity to reshape the industrial pattern, solve the issues of energy crisis and environmental pollution arising from the excessive utilization of fossil fuels, and eventually promote the sustainable development of human society.