Consequential life cycle air emissions externalities for plug-in electric vehicles in the PJM interconnection

Abstract

We perform a consequential life cycle analysis of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), and conventional gasoline vehicles in the PJM interconnection using a detailed, normative optimization model of the PJM electricity grid that captures the change in power plant operations and related emissions due to vehicle charging. We estimate and monetize the resulting human health and environmental damages from life cycle air emissions for each vehicle technology. We model PJM using the most recent data available (2010) as well as projections of the PJM grid in 2018 and a hypothetical scenario with increased wind penetration. We assess a range of sensitivity cases to verify the robustness of our results. We find that PEVs have higher life cycle air emissions damages than gasoline HEVs in the recent grid scenario, which has a high percentage of coal generation on the margin. In particular, battery electric vehicles with large battery capacity can produce two to three times as much air emissions damage as gasoline HEVs, depending on charge timing. In our future 2018 grid scenarios that account for predicted coal plant retirements, PEVs would produce air emissions damages comparable to or slightly lower than HEVs.

Integrating Air Quality and Public Health Benefits in U.S. Decarbonization Strategies

“…Papers were excluded that did not match these criteria. There are a number of closely related fields of study that we exclude from this review scope, including research that: [1] evaluates the climate forcing potential of fuel switching (33,34); [2] omits an explicit calculation of emissions associated with the policy or technology (35,36); [3] calculates (25,37) or applies (11,12,17,38,39) scaling factors to approximate air quality impacts; [4] uses optimization methods to evaluate the most cost-effective way to achieve air quality and greenhouse gas reduction targets (11,17,(40)(41)(42)(43); [5] assumes a fixed criteria air pollutant or greenhouse gas emissions reduction (44)(45)(46)(47)(48), including zeroing out the emissions of a particular sector (49) and global warming temperature targets (50-55); [6] evaluates climate change's impact on air pollution without the context of a climate mitigation action (56,57); [7] conducts life cycle assessments (58); and [8] has not been published in peerreviewed journals (15,59). Beyond the papers from the WoS keyword searches, we included research cited by retrieved papers or that cited retrieved papers, as long as papers met our inclusion criteria.…”

Cost, Energy, and Environmental Impact of Automated Electric Taxi Fleets in Manhattan

“…Aside from savings due to electrification, the elimination of driver labor reduces cost by roughly $1.30/mi, 9 with the remainder of the savings coming from the increased efficiency of a single-operator, smartphonebased system (fleet size is reduced by half), and the lack of medallion fees. Using data cited elsewhere, [44][45][46][47][48][49][50] we can also project the energy, GHG and air pollution emission savings that would result from taxi fleet electrification (see supporting information sections 5 and 6 for details). As shown in Table 2, SAEV fleets result in significantly lower impact in every case except for sulfur dioxide emissions, which would increase by 10% due to high emissions from battery production with the current power grid.…”

Electricity Generation in LCA of Electric Vehicles: A Review

“…Weis et al [42] employ the UCED model, a model used to optimise the operation of energy systems. They use data from EPA's NEEDs database to model the 2010 US energy system, while for the future US scenario (2018) they include retirement of power plants predicted by the EPA and a 3% wind penetration.…”