![Nighttime image of New York City, with the red showing a large population density. “The adoption potential of electric vehicles is remarkably similar across cities, from dense urban areas like New York, to sprawling cities like Houston. This goes against the view that electric vehicles — at least affordable ones, which have limited range — only really work in dense urban centers,” says Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Associate Professor in Energy Studies at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). (Image Credit: Flickr user Doc Searles/CC by 2.0 (edited by the researchers)] Click to Enlarge.](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5l-xrOapvHCjBdi5sLoQJzuNGUAvAQEbmP0etyqIWNiyH-d3Sn0RaAIZYHjl_-cIYYqjGsE5KZwAH_wrvYG8kIio596e_xxX-UGn_BUiJcHY6PbTI5R2_ISNkmGEZbnzsU74KOJM6300t/s1600/MIT-Electric-Transport_0.jpg "Nighttime image of New York City, with the red showing a large population density. “The adoption potential of electric vehicles is remarkably similar across cities, from dense urban areas like New York, to sprawling cities like Houston. This goes against the view that electric vehicles — at least affordable ones, which have limited range — only really work in dense urban centers,” says Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Associate Professor in Energy Studies at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). (Image Credit: Flickr user Doc Searles/CC by 2.0 (edited by the researchers)] Click to Enlarge.")
The study, which found that a wholesale replacement of conventional vehicles with electric ones is possible today and could play a significant role in meeting climate change mitigation goals, was published Monday in the journal Nature Energy by Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Associate Professor in Energy Studies at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), along with graduate student Zachary Needell, postdoc James McNerney, and recent graduate Michael Chang SM ’15.
“Roughly 90 percent of the personal vehicles on the road daily could be replaced by a low-cost electric vehicle available on the market today, even if the cars can only charge overnight,” Trancik says, “which would more than meet near-term U.S. climate targets for personal vehicle travel.” Overall, when accounting for the emissions today from the power plants that provide the electricity, this would lead to an approximately 30 percent reduction in emissions from transportation. Deeper emissions cuts would be realized if power plants decarbonize over time.
Read more at Can Today’s EVs Make a Dent in Climate Change?
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