Abstract
This study reports the likely real-world effects of fleet replacement with electric vehicles (EVs) and higher efficiency EURO 6 vehicles on the exhaustive emissions of NOx, PM, and CO2 in the seven boroughs of the West Midlands (WM) region, UK. National fleet composition data, local EURO distributions, and traffic compositions were used to project vehicle fleet compositions for different roads in each borough. A large dataset of real-world emission factors including over 90,000 remote-sensing measurements, obtained from remote sensing campaigns in five UK cities, was used to parameterize the emission profiles of the studied scenarios. Results show that adoption of the fleet electrification approach would have the highest emission reduction potential on urban roads in WM boroughs. It would result in maximum reductions ranging from 35.0 to 37.9%, 44.3 to 48.3%, and 46.9 to 50.3% for NOx, PM, and CO2, respectively. In comparison, the EURO 6 replacement fleet scenario would lead to reductions ranging from 10.0 to 10.4%, 4.0 to 4.2%, and 6.0 to 6.4% for NOx, PM, and CO2, respectively. The studied mitigation scenarios have higher efficacies on motorways compared to rural and urban roads because of the differences in traffic fleet composition. The findings presented will help policymakers choose climate and air quality mitigation strategies.
Highlights
In recent decades, climate change has typically been regarded as the biggest global threat to civilisation [1,2,3,4]
The general trend for the FEF scenario across the studied areas and pollutants is that electrification of all EURO 6 vehicle types would have the greatest emission reduction potential because of the dominant contribution of EURO 6 vehicles to the total fleet, even though the emission standards for EURO 6 are more stringent than lower EURO classes
Electrification of buses has the potential to reduce a significant proportion of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions, especially for EURO 3 buses in Sandwell, Wolverhampton, and Walsall, where reductions are 10.4%, 9.6%, and 8.8%, respectively
Summary
Climate change has typically been regarded as the biggest global threat to civilisation [1,2,3,4]. Manipulating the fleet by replacing vehicles with those of the latest emission standard, has been recognised as another likely mitigation approach This scenario is simpler than full electrification of the fleet, because the existing infrastructure does not need to change, and has attracted considerable attention after the implementation of low emission zones (LEZs) in European cities over the past decade. The results show that the implementation of all five scenarios will lead to considerable fuel conservation and GHG mitigation at a national scale This localised study focuses on vehicle fleet compositions and compares the effect EURO standard upgrading and EV adoption has on emissions. The contribution of renewable energy farms to the UK energy sector has been gently increased for the last years [38]
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