If Electric Cars Are Good for Reducing Emissions, They Could Be Even Better with Electric Roads.

This research investigates carbon footprint impacts for full fleet electrification of Swedish passenger car travel in combination with different charging conditions, including electric road system (ERS) that enables dynamic on-road charging. The research applies a prospective life cycle analysis framework for estimating carbon footprints of vehicles, fuels, and infrastructure. The framework includes vehicle stock turnover modeling of fleet electrification and modeling of optimal battery capacity for different charging conditions based on Swedish real-world driving patterns. All new car sales are assumed to be electric after 2030 following phase-out policies for gasoline and diesel cars. Implementing ERS on selected high-traffic roads could yield significant avoided emissions in battery manufacturing compared to the additional emissions in ERS construction. ERS combined with stationary charging could enable additional reductions in the cumulative carbon footprint of about 12-24 million tons of CO2 over 30 years (2030-2060) compared to an electrified fleet only relying on stationary charging. The range depends on uncertainty in emission abatement in global manufacturing, where the lower is based on Paris Agreement compliance and the higher on current climate policies. A large share of the reduction could be achieved even if only a small share of the cars adopts the optimized battery capacities.

Impacts of shared mobility on vehicle lifetimes and on the carbon footprint of electric vehicles.

Shared cars will likely have larger annual vehicle driving distances than individually owned cars. This may accelerate passenger car retirement. Here we develop a semi-empirical lifetime-driving intensity model using statistics on Swedish vehicle retirement. This semi-empirical model is integrated with a carbon footprint model, which considers future decarbonization pathways. In this work, we show that the carbon footprint depends on the cumulative driving distance, which depends on both driving intensity and calendar aging. Higher driving intensities generally result in lower carbon footprints due to increased cumulative driving distance over the vehicle's lifetime. Shared cars could decrease the carbon footprint by about 41% in 2050, if one shared vehicle replaces ten individually owned vehicles. However, potential empty travel by autonomous shared vehicles-the additional distance traveled to pick up passengers-may cause carbon footprints to increase. Hence, vehicle durability and empty travel should be considered when designing low-carbon car sharing systems.

Cost-effective implementation of the Paris Agreement using flexible greenhouse gas metrics.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) metrics, that is, conversion factors to evaluate the emissions of non-CO2 GHGs on a common scale with CO2, serve crucial functions in the implementation of the Paris Agreement. While different metrics have been proposed, their economic cost-effectiveness has not been investigated under a range of pathways, including those substantially overshooting the temperature targets. Here, we show that cost-effective metrics for methane that minimize the overall mitigation costs are time-dependent, primarily determined by the pathway, and strongly influenced by temperature overshoot. Parties to the Paris Agreement have already adopted the conventional GWP100 (100-year global warming potential), which is shown to be a good approximation of cost-effective metrics for the coming decades. In the longer term, however, we suggest that parties consider adapting the choice of common metrics to the future pathway as it unfolds, as part of the recurring global stocktake, if global cost-effectiveness is a key consideration.