The European Union supports the promotion of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) to decarbonize the transportation sector. This requires the intrinsic CO2 emissions of BEVs, defined as CO2 emissions from power plants producing the electricity to charge the BEVs, to be lower than the emissions of gasoline cars. To identify the individual power plants producing the electricity to charge the BEVs, a novel georeferenced optimal power flow simulation framework, which models power plants and transmission lines individually, is used in this work. The real central European power system is simulated at hourly resolution for the year 2030. A new model for BEVs, which considers the BEV owner's varying willingness to participate in the electricity market, is implemented into the framework. Simulation results show that there is limited potential for BEVs to reduce the curtailment of solar power (23% reduction of curtailment) and wind power (10% reduction). Instead of renewables, 65% of the electricity used to charge BEVs is produced by conventional power plants such as gas and coal power plants. Consequently, the intrinsic CO2 emissions of BEVs are found to be up to 25% higher than those of gasoline cars. An increase of CO2 prices to 100 Euro/tCO(2) is found to be necessary for BEVs to have intrinsic CO2 emissions comparable to gasoline cars. These findings show that the decarbonization of personal transport requires more efforts that simply promote the sales of electric vehicles. Additional strategies such as increased CO2 prices, which transform the electricity sector from coal to gas and biomass, are required to enable an environmentally friendly implementation of BEVs.