Economic and Environmental Impacts Analyses of Regional Widespread Use of Electric Vehicles

Abstract

We focused on the economic and environmental impacts of regional widespread use of Electric Vehicles (EV). Massive introduction of battery and plug-in hybrid EV will affect the regional energy consumption significantly and therefore, influence environment situations. In this study, we adopted performance price ratio to evaluate cost effectiveness of conventional vehicles and electric vehicles and introduced Grey Relational Analysis method to evaluate environmental changes. Sensitivity analyses indicate that electricity and gasoline price fluctuation will not significantly change cost effectiveness of conventional vehicles and that large scale introduction of EV requires improvement of EV's driving range and adequate charging stations. Electricity generation system also needs to be adjusted to reduce incremental SO2 pollution.© Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2013.