Project Summary
California policymakers consider electric vehicles (EVs) an important element of reducing urban air pollution, lowering carbon emissions and reducing overall petroleum consumption. Earlier this year, California’s Governor Brown issued Executive Order B-48-18, which calls for 5 million zero-emission vehicles statewide by 2030 as part of a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and petroleum use in cars and trucks. In this project, we seek to understand the environmental benefits generated by California EV subsidies by studying what cars are displaced when California households buy EVs. When calculating pollution abatement of EVs, it is insufficient to simply observe what type of car is sold or retired when a household buys an EV. What matters is the fuel efficiency of the car that would have been purchased had the household chosen a conventional vehicle rather than an EV. This project will estimate the distribution of fuel economy of cars that could have been purchased instead of an EV. The project will build on previous work that documents the (causal) increase in EV purchases induced by a major California EV subsidy policy called the Enhanced Fleet Modernization Program (EFMP). The project will use the variation in the EFMP eligibility to answer four questions:
1. What is the distribution of fuel economy of cars that could have been purchased in zip codes where EV subsidies are available?
2. Based on average driving patterns in those zip codes, and under assumptions about the driving patterns of EVs, how many tons of CO2e emissions are avoided as a result of the EV subsidy policy?
3. What is the geographic distribution of emissions that would have occurred in the presence and absence of the EV subsidy policy?
4. What is the relative magnitude of benefits to California that are derived from local pollutant reductions relative to CO2e emissions reductions?
