Last week, we took a look at the role incentives can play in encouraging people to buy electric vehicles (EVs). Today, we bring you a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that attempts to calculate the environmental benefits of EVs versus conventional vehicles in light of those subsidies. Is it as desirable to encourage EV use in a state where the electricity comes from burning coal as it is in a state where that electricity comes from natural gas or nuclear power?
The authors, four economists from the University of North Carolina (UNC) Greensboro, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, and UNC Chapel Hill have created what they describe as "a powerful and unprecedented modeling framework for analyzing electric vehicle policy." They do this with three different components. First, a model of consumer choice between EVs and gasoline-powered cars. Next, they then incorporate the effect of EV charging on air pollution from individual power stations. Finally their model compares the emissions from these power stations with the emissions internal combustion vehicles would produce at the same location.
The analysis uses some quite complicated formulae to calculate the damages that result from emissions per mile from 11 different battery EVs on sale in 2014, compared to the closest internal combustion engine-powered equivalent, independent of price. Where possible they've compared like models, so the EV Ford Focus vs a regular Focus, a Fiat 500e vs a regular Fiat 500, and so on. For cars where there isn't a conventional model (Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Tesla's Model Ss) the authors picked cars they believed were equivalent in features (Toyota Prius, Chevrolet Spark, BMW 7-series). Then they compared the EVs' kWh/mile rating with the gasoline cars' fuel economy, as well as pollution from nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, small particulates, and volatile organic compounds.
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