Assessment of Policy Alternatives for Mitigation of Barriers to EV Adoption

摘要

Electric Vehicle (EV) has become an increasingly important topic in recent years due to energy and environmental concerns. Governments started to focus on remedies to the upcoming climate change threat and seek solutions through policies and regulations. The negative impact of carbon emissions along with pressure from governmental and social organizations force automotive manufacturers to shift to alternative energy sources. However, EV transition is a complex problem because its stakeholders are very diverse including governments, policy makers, EV manufacturers, and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). Consequently, the barriers to EV adoption are not only consumer oriented, rather exist under many categories. The literature has yet to offer a comprehensive, quantified list of barriers to EV adoption. Although the enacted policies are known, the effectiveness of these policies in mitigating EV adoption is not known.;The objective of this research is to assess policy alternatives for mitigation of EV adoption barriers by developing a comprehensive evaluation model. Barriers are grouped under Social, Technical, Environmental, Economic and Political (STEEP) perspectives that are perceived by decision makers as important for adoption process. The decision model of research links the perspectives to barriers, and policy alternatives. The research implements the hierarchical decision model (HDM) to construct a generalized policy assessment framework.;Data for EV adoption barriers were collected from the abovementioned stakeholders.;Experts' qualitative judgments were collected and quantified using the pair-wise comparison method. The final rankings and effectiveness of policy alternatives were calculated. This research's results showed that the most important perspective is Economic. The top three most important barriers to EV adoption were identified as Initial Cost, Battery Cost, and Entrenched Technology Resistance, respectively. The most effective policy in mitigating EV adoption barriers is R&D Incentives. The research also extended the policy effectiveness research with Policy Effectiveness Curves by reaching out to additional experts. These curves helped determine the effectiveness of each of the 6 policies at different implementation levels. Based on these results, 25 scenarios were applied by combinations of policies at different implementation levels to investigate how the effectiveness of policies can change compared to today's conditions.