Technology Improvement Pathways to Cost-Effective Vehicle Electrification
Electrifying transportation can reduce or eliminate dependence on foreign fuels, emission of green house gases, and emission of pollutants. One challenge is finding a pathway for vehicles that gains wide market acceptance to achieve a meaningful benefit. This paper evaluates several approaches aimed at making plug-in electric vehicles (EV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) cost-effective including opportunity charging, replacing the battery over the vehicle life, improving battery life, reducing battery cost, and providing electric power directly to the vehicle during a portion of its travel. Many combinations of PHEV electric range and battery power are included. For each case, the model accounts for battery cycle life and the national distribution of driving distances to size the battery optimally. Using the current estimates of battery life and cost, only the dynamically plugged-in pathway was cost-effective to the consumer. Significant improvements in battery life and battery cost also made PHEVs more cost-effective than today's hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and conventional internal combustion engine vehicles (CVs).
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 979464
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/CP-540-48291; TRN: US201010%%694
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Presented at the 2010 SAE World Congress and Exhibition, 13-15 April 2010, Detroit, Michigan; Related Information: SAE Paper No. 2010-01-0824; For preprint version see NREL/CP-540-47454
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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