Media articles

Figure: Rescue guidelines for firefighters arriving at the scene of accident in Germany.

In the near future, electric powered vehicles will represent a major part of the road traffic. Accordingly, there will be a natural increase of accidents involving electric vehicles. There are not many cases of such accidents yet and therefore the experience and correct handling are still partially open points for the involved parties, such as the rescue services for example. The aim of this work is to provide a complete overview of the accident handling sequence in Germany, starting with the damaged vehicle on site and moving on to the risks and challenges for the stakeholders, such as transport and recycling companies. Arising from the developed overview, a handling recommendation for yet undiscussed points is given. Especially, different extinguishing and deactivation methods are compared and discussed. Due to a lack of a common live-feed from battery data on site, other criteria have to be taken into account to assess the state of the battery. The wrecked vehicle—including the high voltage system—needs to be in a definite safe state at the handover to a towing service. Depending on the case, different options for securing the vehicle will be considered in this work.

Citation: Wöhrl, K.; Geisbauer, C.; Nebl, C.; Lott, S.; Schweiger, H.-G. Crashed Electric Vehicle Handling and Recommendations—State of the Art in Germany. Energies 2021, 14, 1040. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14041040

Figure: Future projection of CO₂ emission derived from music and videos streaming in Japan.

In this study, Tomohiro Tabata et al.  analyzed the CO₂ emissions of online music and video streaming services, as one of the digital contents, in Japan using life cycle assessment. As a system boundary of online music and video streaming, processes such as data center construction and server manufacturing, usage of communication networks and internet communication technology devices (personal computers (PCs) and smartphones), and disposal of data centers and servers were considered. Data were collected using statistical and online surveys, and CO2 emissions per 1 MB of communication volume
were calculated.

One of the results revealed that the lifecycle CO₂ emissions of listening to online music using PCs and smartphones were 5.88x10^-4 and 1.43x10^-4 kg-CO₂/MB, respectively. The overall CO₂ emissions for domestic music and video streaming services in 2019 was 921 thousand t-CO₂. Online video streaming accounted for 87.7% of the total emissions, which corresponded to approximately 0.23% of domestic CO₂ emissions derived from electric power generation.

Citation: Tabata, T.; Wang, T.Y. Life Cycle Assessment of CO₂ Emissions of Online Music and Videos Streaming in Japan. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 3992. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11093992