Abstract
In the province of Quebec, Canada where the electricity is nearly carbon-free, the road transport sector represents 35.6% of all emissions. As such, electric vehicles (EVs) have been proposed as a means to reduce such emissions. However, it is not clear how many conventional vehicles (CVs) would need to change to electric in order to meet the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction target of reducing 1990 CO2 emissions by 37.5% by 2030 in the province. In fact, various considerations exist such as which vehicles will change and how those vehicles are used. This articleaddresses this issue in the case of Montreal, Canada. First, to create a baseline, direct emissions by all personal vehicles in Montreal in 2018 are calculated using data from the 2018 origin-destination (OD) survey and provincial vehicle registration. Next, five scenarios are studied to calculate the variations in the number of EVs needed in the fleet in order to achieve provincial targets. The most optimistic scenario shows that roughly 49% of the fleet would need to change. The most pessimistic scenario estimates that almost 73% of the fleet would need to be converted to EVs. It can be concluded that the strategy used can have a great impact on how many vehicles need to be replaced in the fleet. However, all simulations show that the necessary replacements are far from negligible. It must surely be coupled with other actions such as reducing veh.km travelled (vkmt) or increasing public transport use.
Highlights
In the province of Quebec, Canada where electricity is produced through hydropower, the transport sector represents 44.8% of all emissions [1]
As it could be expected, when electric vehicles (EVs) emission value increases, more conventional vehicles (CVs) need to be replaced in order to reach a given greenhouse gas (GHG) emission threshold because the emission difference between vehicles is lower
The other sensitivity analyse suggests that the type of vehicle chosen has not much importance on total CO2 emissions either, as long as it is an EV, but it must not be forgotten that the study carried out in this paper only focuses on tailpipe emissions, and does not take into account the whole life cycle like articles [13,18]
Summary
In the province of Quebec, Canada where electricity is produced through hydropower, the transport sector represents 44.8% of all emissions [1]. Personal vehicles in Quebec were responsible for the emission of 16 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2019. This accounts for approximately 20% of total GHG emissions in the province [2]. This sector is an important lever to achieve the target of reducing Quebec emissions by 37.5%. Sorrentino et al [13] analysed the impacts of EVs on electricity grid and infrastructures, and on CO2 emissions in Italy, Germany, France, USA, and Japan. The authors found that current energy mixes and expected EV market penetration were insufficient to reach CO2 emission targets in these countries in
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