No Place Like Home: Charging Infrastructure and the Environmental Advantage of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Johannes Gessner (), Wolfgang Habla, Benjamin Rübenacker and Ulrich J. Wagner ()

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: Many European companies face the challenge of lowering CO2 emissions from their company car fleets. A promising lever is to increase the notoriously low electric usage of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs). This paper examines whether home charging infrastructure can help achieve these goals. We leverage quasi-experimental variation in the delivery and installation of home chargers to quantify the impact of this technology on energy use and CO2 emissions of PHEV company cars held by 856 employees of a large German company. Since fuel and electricity expenditures for these cars are covered by the employer, home charging mainly changes the non-monetary costs to an employee. We find that access to home charging increases electricity consumption by 317.9 kWh per quarter and decreases fuel consumption by 97.97 liters, reducing CO2 emissions by 38%. Moreover, access to home charging increases the employee's propensity to choose a Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) upon renewal of the lease by 28.4 percentage points. We use these estimates to compute the private levelized abatement costs of home chargers for a range of scenarios characterizing the diffusion of BEVs and the effect of the program on vehicle choice. With current tax-inclusive energy prices, home chargers break even for the company within eight to 16 years.

Keywords: home charging; charging infrastructure; plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles; company cars (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 L91 Q52 R42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67
Date: 2025-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp663 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2025_663

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRC Office ().