Electric vehicle cost, emissions, and water footprint in the United States: Development of a regional optimization model

Mehdi Noori, Stephanie Gardner and Omer Tatari

Energy, 2015, vol. 89, issue C, 610-625

Abstract: The life cycle cost and environmental impacts of electric vehicles are very uncertain, but extremely important for making policy decisions. This study presents a new model, called the Electric Vehicles Regional Optimizer, to model this uncertainty and predict the optimal combination of drivetrains in different U.S. regions for the year 2030. First, the life cycle cost and life cycle environmental emissions of internal combustion engine vehicles, gasoline hybrid electric vehicles, and three different Electric Vehicle types (gasoline plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, gasoline extended range electric vehicle, and all-electric vehicle) are evaluated considering their inherent uncertainties. Then, the environmental damage costs and the water footprint of the studied drivetrains are estimated. Additionally, using an Exploratory Modeling and Analysis method, the uncertainties in the life cycle cost, environmental damage cost, and water footprint of studied vehicle types are modeled for different U.S. electricity grid regions. Finally, an optimization model is coupled with Exploratory Modeling and Analysis to find the ideal combination of different vehicle types in each U.S. region for the year 2030. The findings of this research will help policy makers and transportation planners to prepare our nation's transportation system for the influx of electric vehicles.

Keywords: Electric vehicles; Life cycle cost; Environmental damage cost; Water footprint; Inherent uncertainty; Stochastic optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544215007811
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:energy:v:89:y:2015:i:c:p:610-625

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2015.05.152

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().