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The Role of Electric Vehicles in Achieving Climate Goals

This paper describes how the intensifying climate change comes along with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly. The transport sector’s substantial role in this context leads to the imperative to decrease the energy demand in transportation considerably. The changeover from cars with combustion engines to electric vehicles is currently strongly supported by politics, also being justified with the positive effects on climate goals that would come with it. This raises high expectations in media, industry, society and lobby groups. The author wants to analyze its actual impact on climate goals, as well as its side effects and possible counter-productive interactions with other system elements of transportation. In the first step, the author examines several actions for reducing energy demand in transportation and their effects by means of a qualitative sensitivity analysis. Although being strongly financially supported by the German government, this analysis shows that electric vehicles do not contribute significantly to reduce the total energy demand in transport. The author would like to investigate this controversial correlation. Speaking for electric vehicles, there is the comparably low energy demand for the end user and the theoretical option to operate electric vehicles independently of fossil fuels. Also, due to the current electricity price, operational costs for driving an electric vehicle would be much cheaper compared to a conventional car. However, this could also result in an increasing vehicle mileage. The future structure of power plants that would be necessary to meet the increasing demand of electricity is another important variable to be analyzed. In turn, these factors would counterbalance today’s linear estimations regarding CO2-emissions, electricity price and demand of fossil fuels. Since the qualitative sensitivity analysis does not account for all of those factors, the author uses a more detailed model for further inspections. This model contains the feedback of electricity demand, electricity price, price elasticity of mobility and the changing demand of electric mobility helps to analyze these interactions and impacts. The obtained results of the detailed simulation give an insight into the impacts of one particular action, namely the changeover to electric vehicles. However, the meaning of this measure in the overall context of climate goals needs to be observed separately. The European emission trading that was introduced in 2005 is a powerful tool to limit CO2-emissions in various sectors. The introduction of a large number of electric vehicles will automatically include a part of the transportation sector into the emission trading scheme. However, as long as conventional cars are excluded from this, new questions regarding efficient CO2-reduction arise. The author discusses the interactions of electric vehicles and the European emission trading as well as some approaches to integrate conventional cars into the trading scheme.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 14p
  • Monograph Title: European Transport Conference, 2010 Proceedings

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01353001
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Files: TRIS
  • Created Date: Sep 30 2011 7:38AM