Citation:

Loughlin, D., S. Babaee, Y. Ou, C. Lenox, C. Nolte, Tai-Shaing Wu, S. Burke, M. Cleveland, C. Ramig, M. Shell, R. Sims, A. Sobel, AND S. Smith. Air pollutant emission impacts of electric vehicle market penetration scenarios. 2019 Community Modeling and Analysis System (CMAS) Conference, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, October 21 - 23, 2019.

Impact/Purpose:

Nearly 40% of the U.S. population lives in areas that are classified as being in nonattainament or in maintenance status for the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). In these areas, attainment of the NAAQS into the future may be challenged by factors such as population and economic growth, climate change, land use change, and the introduction of new technologies. Air quality planning would benefit from understanding the potential effects of these factors and evaluating the efficacy of current and existing management strategies. Computer models can provide a useful "virtual environment" for exploring these topics. The Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) is a human-earth system model that simulates the co-evolution of the energy, industrial, buildings, and agricultural sectors, considering assumptions about current and future technologies and policies. A variant of GCAM, GCAM-USA, incorporates state-level resolution for the U.S. We apply GCAM-USA to evaluate the net energy and emissions impacts of broader electric vehicle market penetration. With GCAM-USA, we can evaluate the primary emission impacts (e.g., displaced conventional vehicles), secondary impacts (e.g., from increased electricity production and decreased refining), and tertiary impacts (e.g., due to price-induced fuel switching). This study demonstrates these capabilities and is intended to be of interest to the air quality research community as well as state-level air quality management planners.

Description:

In 2018, electric vehicle (EV) sales had grown to over 1.2% of new U.S. light-duty vehicle market. That percentage is predicted to increase dramatically over the coming decades. For example, the 2019 Annual Energy Outlook estimates that EVs will constitute nearly 19% of sales in 2050, and some other projections predict much greater EV sales. If such projections are realized, there could be implications for air quality. For example, while EVs would lead to reduced transportation emissions, there would also be accompanying emission changes in the electric sector and refineries, as well as in fuel extraction and transport. Understanding the overall emissions impacts of EVs will be important, particularly for areas that are currently in or near nonattainment of the air quality standards or that are considering incentivizing EV sales to meet climate and air quality goals. In this poster, we will discuss an emerging modeling platform for evaluating the emission impacts of EV scenarios. The Global Change Assessment Model with state-level resolution (GCAM-USA) includes representations of the energy, industry, buildings, and agricultural systems, simulating how those systems evolve and interact over the coming decades. Outputs of the model include technology and fuel choices, fuel prices, and emissions. We demonstrate the use of GCAM-USA to examine three different EV market penetration scenarios and evaluate the net emissions implications of each. We also discuss future directions, including linkage of GCAM-USA with a “load tool” for examining alternative charging profiles and with the Integrated Planning Model (IPM) for examining power sector dynamics in more detail.

Record Details: