Water resource impacts of future electric vehicle development in China

Abstract

In China, vehicle electrification is developed as a way to decouple people's increasing demand for on-road transport and concerns for adverse environmental impacts. Replacing conventional fuel with electricity not only yields impacts on air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but also on water resources. This study addresses such impacts for the first time. Based on China's existing plans, we expect China's future electric vehicles will grow from 5 million in 2020 to 80 million in 2030, requiring 47 to 335 TWh of electricity supplies respectively. In order to produce such amount of electricity, under a baseline scenario, 42.60 million m³ and 1.09 billion m³ of water is projected to be consumed and withdrawn in 2020, respectively, which are expected to grow to 324.45 million and 8.56 billion m³ in 2030. Deploying renewable energies offers considerable potentials cutting electric vehicles' indirect impacts on water resources by more than 20% as their productions require less water inputs than coal-fired power plants. Changing cooling technologies' impacts differ by regions, increasing water consumption in southern regions while reducing water consumption in the north. However, if water consumption avoided from avoiding conventional fuel productions is taken into account, compared to the counterfactual scenario where the same number of traditional vehicles will be deployed, future electric vehicles in China will lead to net decreases of 19.3, 64.3 and 89.7 million m³ of scarce water consumption nationally under baseline, high renewable and cooling technology change scenarios in the electric power sector respectively.