Conventional, hybrid, plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles? State-based comparative carbon and energy footprint analysis in the United States

Onat, Nuri Cihat; Küçükvar, Murat; Tatari, Ömer

doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.04.001

Cited by 310 publications

(129 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…The goal of LCA is to assess the environmental impact of products from a system perspective and to identify possible improvement strategies [125,126]. Developing strategies to improve the environmental, social, and economic performance of a product cannot be realized with an isolated evaluation of impacts in these different domains as system-of-interest, considering the fact that environment, society, and economy are interconnected and affect one another [9].…”

Section: Deepening the Assessment: Revealing Dynamic Causal And Tramentioning

confidence: 99%

Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives

et al. 2017

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Abstract:Tracking the environmental impacts of production, use, and disposal of products (e.g., goods, and services) have been an important issue in the global economy. Although Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a widely applied method to track these environmental impacts and support policies, it has certain limitations and an isolated way of evaluating the environmental impacts with no consideration of social and economic impacts and mechanisms. To overcome the limits of current LCA, three mechanisms have been proposed in the literature: (1) broadening the indicators by including social and economic indicators in addition to the environmental impacts; (2) broadening the scope of analysis from product-level assessment to national and global levels; (3) deepening the assessment by inclusion of more mechanisms to account for interrelations among the system elements, uncertainty analysis, stakeholder involvement, etc. With these developments, LCA has been evolving into a new framework called Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA). Practical application of LCSA requires integration of various methods, tools, and disciplines. In this study, a comprehensive literature review is conducted to investigate recent developments, current challenges, and future perspectives in the LCSA literature. According to the review, a high number (40%) of LCSA studies are from the environmental science discipline, while contributions from other disciplines such as economics (3%) and social sciences (9%) are very low. On broadening the scope of analysis, 58% of the studies are product-level works, while 37% quantified the impacts at national level and achieved an economy-wide analysis, and only 5% of the studies were able to quantify the global impacts of products using LCSA framework. Furthermore, current applications of LCSA have not considered the rebound effects, feedback mechanisms, and interrelations of the system of interest sufficiently. To address these challenges, we present a complete discussion about the overarching role of systems thinking to bring tools, methods and disciplines together, and provide practical examples from the earlier studies that have employed various system-based methods. We discuss the importance of integrated system-based methods for advancement of LCSA framework in the following directions: (1) regional and global level LCSA models using multi-region input-output analysis that is capable of quantitatively capturing macro-level social, environmental, and economic impacts; (2) dealing with uncertainties in LCSA during multi-criteria decision-making process and expert judgments in weighting of LCSA indicators; and (3) integration of system dynamics modeling to reveal complex interconnections, dependencies, and causal relationships between sustainability indicators.

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Section: Deepening the Assessment: Revealing Dynamic Causal And Tramentioning

confidence: 99%

Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives

et al. 2017

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“…Although the literature is abundant with studies focusing on environmental impacts of alternative vehicle technologies [1,2,13,[48][49][50][51], the social and economic dimensions of adoption of these vehicle technologies were not investigated sufficiently. Moreover, studies covering economic dimensions are mostly limited to life cycle cost analyses and do not investigate the economy-wide impacts of alternative vehicle technologies.…”

Section: Research Objectives Against the Background Of The State-of-tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Especially, concerns associated with global climate change, energy security, rising oil prices, and depletion of fossil fuels are stimulating the search for alternative vehicle technologies. Hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and battery electric vehicles (BEV) are some of these alternative vehicle technologies, which can help to address the aforementioned issues by shifting transportation energy sources use from fossil fuels to electricity, under low carbon electricity generation scenarios [1,2].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of Alternative Passenger Vehicles

2014

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Sustainable transportation and mobility are key components and central to sustainable development. This research aims to reveal the macro-level social, economic, and environmental impacts of alternative vehicle technologies in the U.S. The studied vehicle technologies are conventional gasoline, hybrid, plug-in hybrid with four different all-electric ranges, and full battery electric vehicles (BEV). In total, 19 macro level sustainability indicators are quantified for a scenario in which electric vehicles are charged through the existing U.S. power grid with no additional infrastructure, and an extreme scenario in which electric vehicles are fully charged with solar charging stations. The analysis covers all life cycle phases from the material extraction, processing, manufacturing, and operation phases to the end-of-life phases of vehicles and batteries. Results of this analysis revealed that the manufacturing phase is the most influential phase in terms of socio-economic impacts compared to other life cycle phases, whereas operation phase is the most dominant phase in the terms of environmental impacts and some of the socio-economic impacts such as human health and economic cost of emissions. Electric vehicles have less air pollution cost and human health impacts compared to conventional gasoline vehicles. The economic cost of emissions and human health impact reduction potential can be up to 45% and 35%, respectively, if electric vehicles are charged through solar charging stations. Electric vehicles have potential to generate income for low and medium skilled workers in the U.S. In addition to quantified sustainability indicators, some sustainability metrics were developed to OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2014, 6 9306 compare relative sustainability performance alternative passenger vehicles. BEV has the lowest greenhouse gas emissions and ecological land footprint per $ of its contribution to the U.S. GDP, and has the lowest ecological footprint per unit of its energy consumption. The only sustainability metrics that does not favor the BEV is the water-energy ratio, where the conventional gasoline vehicle performed best.

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“…This parameter can be denoted as well-to-wheel emission and it has a lower value for EVs [163]. In [164], well-to-wheel and production phases are taken into account to calculate the impact of EVs on the environment. This approach stated the EVs to be the least carbon intensive among the vehicles.…”

Section: Impact On Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Comprehensive Study of Key Electric Vehicle (EV) Components, Technologies, Challenges, Impacts, and Future Direction of Development

Un-Noor¹,

Padmanaban²,

Mihet‐Popa³

et al. 2017

Preprint

154

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Electric vehicles (EV) are getting more commonplace in the transportation sector in recent times. As the present trend suggests, this mode of transport is likely to replace the internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles in near future. Each of the main EV components has a number of technologies that are currently in use or can become prominent in the future. EVs can cause significant impacts on the environment, power system, and other related sectors. The present power system can face huge instabilities with enough EV penetration; but with proper management and coordination, EVs can be turned into a major contributor to the successful implementation of smart grid. There are possibilities of immense environmental benefits as well, as the EVs can extensively reduce the greenhouse gas emission from the transportation sector. However, there are some major obstacles for EVs to overcome before replacing the ICE vehicles totally. This paper is focused on reviewing all the useful data available on EV configurations, energy sources, motors, charging techniques, optimization techniques, impacts, trends, and possible directions of future developments. Its objective is to provide an overall picture of the current EV technology and ways of future development to assist in future researches in this sector.

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Conventional, hybrid, plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles? State-based comparative carbon and energy footprint analysis in the United States

Cited by 310 publications

References 40 publications

Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives

Systems Thinking for Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: A Review of Recent Developments, Applications, and Future Perspectives

Towards Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment of Alternative Passenger Vehicles

A Comprehensive Study of Key Electric Vehicle (EV) Components, Technologies, Challenges, Impacts, and Future Direction of Development

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