Innovation in the LED lighting industry is generally measured in terms of two categories – cost reductions and efficiency improvements. The former is reflected in the final price tag. The latter is measured in terms of “lumens per watt,” describing the amount of visible light that a source emits at a certain rate of energy consumption.

According to a Philips, their new prototype tube lighting produces 200 lumens per watt (200 lm/W). And it is expected to cost only slightly more than the equivalent strip lighting set-up (at 100 lm/W). Traditional bulbs only produce 15 lm/W.

But, the arguably more significant accomplishment with Philip’s new TLED is that it produces warm white (~2700K) light, the type of light prehat most people prefer for indoor lighting. An easy way to increase the efficiency of a bulb design is to increase the color temperature. So, the fact that Phillips managed to keep the temperature in this lower range, while still hitting the 200 lm/W rating, is even more impressive.

Globally, building lighting represents 15-19% of total energy consumption and florescent tube lighting accounts for more than half of the lighting market. In the context of Thursday’s announcement – if Philips’s new bulb makes it to market by the summer of 2015, it will have the potential to reduce worldwide energy use by more than 7%.

Photo Credit:
1. Photo of Coen Liedenbaum at Philips Research shows the first prototype TLED, providing 200 lumens per watt with high quality of light courtesy of Philips.

This article was originally published on Scientific American’s Plugged In on April 13, 2013.

Many groups are taking this to heart, developing strategic plans designed to systematically increase energy access. Entrepreneurs like Dr. Laura Stachel are using solar power to bring light to clinics throughout Africa, Asia, and Central America. Other groups, like Empower Generation, are focusing on bringing light to homes throughout Nepal.

In Nepal, 60% of the population currently lives without access to electricity. For this more than 17 million people that means less hours to read, work, and study. It also means millions of people who regularly depend on dangerous lighting options including indoor kerosene lanterns.

Today, there are options available to replace these lanterns with solar lights, including one offered by social entrepreneurs at Empower Generation. This group is working to connect women in Nepal with technology suppliers. In doing so, they hope to build a sustainable network that will bring light to the 17 million Nepalese households that currently sit in the dark.

The company was founded by two indisputably passionate individuals, Anya and Bennett. According to the company, their story started like this:

“Anya was looking to offer sustainable employment to women otherwise vulnerable to slavery while Bennett was thinking about how to enable the widespread adoption of clean energy in developing countries.

Together, co-founders Anya and Bennett identified a tremendous opportunity to create gender and energy paradigm shifts by empowering women to become clean energy entrepreneurs.”

And, while their goal is to bring light to Nepal, their current primary fundraiser makes these lights available to anyone with access to their website. Through a give-one, get-one offer, those who give a solar light or light/charger combo to a family in Nepal will then get one for their own use as well. The company’s goal is to send 200 units to Nepal through this offer, laying the foundation for millions more.

For more information on Empower Generation’s Give One, Get One offer - website.

Photo Credit: Photos used in this post by empowergeneration.

This post was originally published on Scientific American on April 16, 2013.

Global electric vehicle (EV) sales more than doubled between 2011 and 2012, leading to a global stock topping 180,000. This represents just 0.02% of total passenger cars on the road. But, it is ahead of schedule to reach international goals of having 20 million EVs on the road by 2020.

According to Tali Trigg (@talitrigg), EV and sustainable mobility expert at the International Energy Agency (IEA), the GEO does not say that it is necessarily all sunny days ahead for EVs. Trigg cautions that “it is easier to more than double sales in the beginning of a market than in a more mature market… but we are getting to the interim steps that we need to get to 2020 targets.”

According to the numbers, EV market growth is ahead of schedule. Trigg says that “if you look at the growth rates you would need from 2011 to get to the 20 million by 2020 target, we surpassed them in 2012.” And, the marketplace appears to be preparing itself for continued growth, with significant infrastructure deployment throughout EVI countries.

Trigg points out that the report includes a discussion of the history of EVs, which provides context for today’s discussions. The original electric vehicle dates back to the the 1830s. The differences between found in today’s “third age” for EVs sheds light on future potential.

Both the “EV City Casebook” and the “Global EV Outlook” (GEO) report were authored by the Clean Energy Ministerial’s Electric Vehicles Initiative (EVI). The EVI member group includes 15 governments from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America as well as participation from the International Energy Agency. Included are 8 of the world’s 10 largest auto markets, representing 63% of the world’s vehicle demand. These markets are expected to account for 83% of EV sales between now and 2020. Data from these countries shows the distinct geographic distribution of EVs, and the fact sheet goes into detail on where and what type.

The GEO also discusses where EVs are with respect to the growth of hybrid electric vehicles in the market as it tries to answer the question of “where should we be today?” In 2012, hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) sales reached 1.2 million (43% growth rate), with Japan and the US representing 91% of global sales. EV sales more than doubled in 2012, with more than 100,000 in total sales. In order to meet 2DS target deployment rates, HEV and EV sales need to average 50% and 80% annual growth rates, respectively.

In order to achieve these growth rates, the report includes an “Opportunity Matrix,” which plots out pathways forward for the coming decade. These pathways identify where opportunities exist for public and private support in addition to key areas for collaboration.

Overall, the data presented today in the “Global EV Outlook” (GEO) illustrated a rapidly growing EV market that is on track to reach 20 million EVs on the road by 2020. But, there is still a long way to go. The GEO cautions that there is still a long way to go, with current market shares for EVs still sitting below 1% in major markets. Regardless, current sales are on track to meet or exceed the IEA’s 2DS scenario goals.

This post was originally published on Scientific American’s blog, Plugged In on April 18, 2013

This month, at the Clean Energy Ministerial meeting in New Delhi, the International Energy Agency released two reports – “Tracking Clean Energy Progress 2013” and the “Global EV Outlook.” The latter includes landmark trending data for the global electric vehicle (EV) market, which was then used to determine the overall trajectory of a global clean-energy transition.

The Highlights

According to these two reports, despite significant gains in renewable power generation, coal technologies still dominate and nuclear power continues to struggle. But, a window of opportunity is opening in the transportation sector.

The tracking report reveals analysis shows that the world is not moving quickly enough to meet environmental targets. Key technologies are not being developed. Global research and development investments need to be dramatically increased. The clean-energy transition appears to have stalled.

The world is sitting on a sustainability precipice and, in the words of IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven, “we must change course before it is too late.”

Eleven Progress Areas – Two On Track

In this IEA “Tracking Clean Energy Progress 2013” report, the authors outline a set of eleven progress areas that their analysis has identified as being essential in moving the globe through a cost-effective clean-energy transition. These areas are:

1. Renewable power
2. Nuclear power
3. Gas-fired power
4. Coal-fired power
5. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)
6. Industry
7. Fuel Economy
8. Electric and hybrid-electric vehicles
9. Biofuels
10. Buildings
11. Smart grids

Of these eleven interrelated areas, just two – renewable power and electric and hybrid-electric vehicles (EV and HEVs) – are on track according to IEA metrics. The other nine are all behind with gas-fired power, industry, fuel economy, and smart grids showing limited improvement. Progress for the remaining five (nuclear power, coal-fired power, CCS, biofuels, and buildings) hardly registered in 2012.

Defining Clean-Energy “Progress”

“Progress” is discussed in this IEA report in context with the 2^°C Scenario (2DS), as presented in the IEA’s “Energy Technology Perspectives” (ETP) publication.  The 2DS looks at the most cost-effective way to cut energy-related CO₂ emissions in half by 2050 (compared to a 2009 baseline). This level of emissions reduction is broadly consistent with the “450” scenario that climate scientists argue “would give an 80% chance of limiting average global temperature increase by 2^°C.”

For reference, the world today is estimated to be on track toward an average global temperature increase of 6^°C by 2050. This scenario is shown at the top line in the chart below.  This 6DS represents a doubling of energy-related emissions between 2012 and 2050.

ETP publications include the results of least-cost scenario analysis for a global clean-energy transition to meet the 2DS environmental constraints. Modeling was completed using MARKAL-TIMES and a series of independent Excel-based demand models for industry, buildings, and transportation.

With this modeling approach, the least-cost pathway for a 2DS was shown to include contributions from all sectors and a wide variety of technologies.  This lease cost pathway is what led to the set of eleven areas that the IEA uses in measuring global clean-energy progress.

Nine Progress Areas Are Struggling

Out of the eleven progress areas defined in the IEA’s 2DS, nine are not on track to meet 2020 targets. These technologies struggle with a host of challenges including high capital investment requirements and a lack of supporting policies.

Nuclear power, for example, costs relatively little to operate. But, these power plants require significant upfront investment.  Most world markets are not structured to reduce investment risks and so plants don’t get built. Further, the Fukushima incident in March 2013 shook public confidence.

Coal power continues to dominate in the electricity generation space. Without pricing and climate change policies it is unlikely that this trend will change. Further, the lack of government commitment to emissions reductions is preventing carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) demonstration projects from getting off the ground.

But, perhaps the most frustrating to energy analysts is the off-track progress area of energy efficiency in buildings. Only three countries in the world have best-practice building codes. As a result, new construction is still dominated by less energy-efficient designs.

Transport – “A Window of Opportunity”

According to the IEA, transport is one of only two progress areas on track to meet 2DS targets. According to their tracking report, while biofuels production was static in 2012, advanced biofuels capacity grew by about 30%. Further, electric and hybrid-electric vehiclesrealized significant gains.

Hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) sales reached 1.2 million (43% growth rate) in 2012, with Japan and the US representing 91% of global sales. EV sales more than doubled in 2012, with more than 100,000 in total sales. In order to meet 2DS target deployment rates, HEV and EV sales need to average 50% and 80% annual growth rates, respectively.

This is the first time that these global data for EV sales have been published. Today, in conjunction with the New Delhi meetings, the first “Global EV Outlook” report was also released. Included are the results of two years of primary data gathering and analysis by the Clean Energy Ministerial’s Electric Vehicles Initiative (EVI).

This initiative’s membership includes 15 governments and the IEA, with 8 of the 10 largest auto markets represented. The data that EVI has collected gives a baseline for measuring progress in this area. And, simultaneously, it demonstrates the importance of data access to measuring progress in global clean-energy efforts.

Data presented today in the “Global EV Outlook” (GEO) illustrated a rapidly growing EV market that is on track to reach 20 million EVs on the road by 2020. But, it also cautions that there is still a long way to go, with current market shares for EVs still sitting below 1% in major markets. Regardless, current sales are on track to meet or exceed the IEA’s 2DS scenario goals.

Renewable Power Going Strong

In order to meet the energy-related emissions goals, the IEA’s 2^°C Scenario shows renewable power generation growing from 20% to 57% of total generation between 2010 and 2050. Hydropower is the largest contributor, followed by wind, biomass, waste, and solar technologies. This scenario also shows renewables growing to 28% of total generation by 2020. And, these technologies appear to be on track to hit this midterm goal.

According to the IEA, renewables have shows steady market growth over the last decade. Renewable deployment is continuing to spread geographically, with countries including China, India, and Brazil increasing their use of renewables from 45% of total generation in 2010 to 53% in 2011.

Solar PV has seen “explosive growth” over the past year, almost doubling its total generation from 2010 to 2011. Further, new capacity installations continued, despite incentive cuts in markets including Germany and Italy. In fact, deployment seems to be spreading into Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Other renewables including onshore and offshore wind, geothermal, biomass, biogas, and renewable municipal waste are on track to hitting 2DS 2020 targets. But, ocean power still remains a small contributor due to costly technology.

The Power is in the Data

One of the key findings in the IEA’s Clean Energy Tracking report was that poor quality and availability of data consistently constrains their ability to track and assess progress.  For example, the smart grids category has seen significant movement over the last few years. According to the IEA, demonstration and deployment of smart grid technologies are accelerating. But, data collection efforts on national and international levels are too limited to give a solid picture of the progress made.

The premier of the “Global EV Outlook” (GEO) at this year’s CEM meeting is one example of IEA’s facilitation of better data collection. Last year, its predecessor – the EV City Casebook – established a baseline for the global EV market. This year’s publication presents the results of two years of primary data gathering and analysis from 8 of the 10 largest auto markets in the world.

Put another way – this is the first time that global data on EV market growth has been published since the Clean Energy Ministerial was established. As IEA continues its work, improved collection of and access to data will be an important factor in measuring 1) how far the clean-energy transition has come and 2) how much further it has to go.

Photo Credit:

1. ETP 2012 graphs and charts by the IEA available here .
2. Energy systems model PPT slide by Uwe Remme, IEA. Presentation available here.

This article was originally published on Scientific American’s Plugged In on April 17, 2013

Thanks to Carin Bondar and her team for putting these videos together each month!

Originally published on Scientific American’s blog, Plugged In on April 25, 2013

But, before these vehicles will be found at dealerships near you, these three autogiants have some major challenges to overcome including:

• Cost.
• Reliability.
• A lack of fuel infrastructure….
• (the list continues)

Historically, these barriers – in particular, the infrastructure challenge – have thwarted the industry’s best efforts to propel hydrogen vehicles into a competitive position as the alternative fuel vehicle that can significantly reduce the fleet’s reliance on oil.

But, the automaking trio says that this time is different.By examining and understanding the lessons-learned in past efforts to create a competitive fuel-cell vehicle, these companies believe that they will overcome the hurdles that previously bested them.

In an article published by Wired Magazine, Damon Lavrinc reports that:

“Each automaker will throw the same amount of funding into the project to create a vehicle the consortium claims will be “affordable” and designed for the “mass market.” The cars could be available as early as 2017. Each vehicle will use the same core components, but will be built on platforms unique to each automaker, allowing for different body styles, interior configurations and branding.“

But, the author’s skepticism of this optimistic view on the future of fuel cell vehicles is evident when he goes on to state that:

“…this is hardly the first time an automaker has claimed to solve the puzzle. Toyota has promised to have a fuel-cell vehicle on the road by 2015. General Motors has been pimping the technology for awhile. But it’s always been hampered by the development of infrastructure, even if there are big-rigs and even airplanes using hydrogen. Still, there is a skyrocketing number of patents that deal with the technology, so it’s not like the technology has been abandoned.”

Bottom line – Daimler, Ford, and Renault-Nissan might be able to overcome the cost and reliability problems previously found with fuel cell vehicles. Their engineering know-how and innovative spirit has certainly led to impressive accomplishments in the past. But, if they want to see their new designs out on the road, they need to also focus on infrastructure.

Photo Credit:

1. Photo of Nissan fuel cell vehicle by DVS1mn and used under this Creative Commons license.

2. Photo of fuel cell vehicle near Sacramento, California, USA by Robert Couse-Baker and used under this Creative Commons License.

[This post originally appeared on Scientific American's Plugged In on January 30]

According to France’s environment minister, Delphine Batho, this shift will reduce total annual energy consumption by the equivalent of 750,000 households. But, the main motivation behind the new decree is public health. According to Ms. Batho’s statement, artificial light can cause “significant disruptions on ecosystems” by disturbing sleep and migration patterns.

National Geographic’s Verlyn Klinkenborg says that light pollution  is largely the result of bad lighting design that “washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feeding—is affected.” Today, the world’s bright lights can be seen from space, as shown in NASA’s famous night lights photos.

The new French law will combat light pollution by forcing lights in non-residential buildings to blink out within a hour of the last employee’s departure. Even shop window displays will go dark at 1 am.

Exceptions include lights for Christmas and other special occasions, as well as significant tourist attractions. For example, the Eiffel Tower will continue to dazzle tourists with its hourly sparkles. And, Paris’s largest Christmas market, on the Champs-Elysees, will still be a lighted beacon to welcome in the holiday season.

Photo Credit:

1. Photo of night lights by NASA

2. All other photos by Melissa C. Lott. No reproductions or use permitted without Melissa C. Lott’s expressed permission.

[This post was originally published on Scientific American's Plugged In on February 11]

By Scott McNally

[This post was originally published on Scientific American's Plugged In on February 14]

Solar energy is often criticized for its inefficiency – that only about 10% of the sunlight that hits a common commercial solar panel will be converted into electricity. Similar criticisms are voiced against biofuels, which have a solar energy to biofuel conversion efficiency of less than about 2%.* But how do these efficiencies compare to other sources of energy, like oil? Turns out – solar and biofuels do pretty well.

First consider this; we truly have three primary sources of energy: nuclear, geothermal, and solar**. Solar energy is the original source of energy for wind, biomass, fossil fuels, and even hydroelectric. The sun creates temperature gradients on the surface of the Earth, which creates wind. Biomass photosynthesis is powered by solar photons, and sometimes that biomass falls to the ground, gets buried, and cooked into fossil fuels. Hydroelectric dams harness the potential energy of water, but the water has to get “uphill” somehow. This happens when the sun lifts the water through evaporation, which is later released as rain.

These ‘sources’ of energy – wind, biomass, and hydro – are not true sources; they are really just different ways to carry, or convert solar energy. When comparing these types of energies, it is useful to think about how efficiently each type converts solar energy into a useful form of energy. In the cases of wind, hydro and solar, the useable form of energy is usually electricity; with biomass and oil, we get some sort of liquid fuel that can be used to either move your car or generate electricity. For the sake of simplicity, we will say that all of these sources end up as electricity.

Now we know that solar panel conversion efficiency is about 10%, and the biomass solar conversion efficiency is about 2%. As it turns out, that’s pretty good.

Let’s look at fossil fuels, oil in particular. Now, fossil fuels are pretty great. They are very energy dense, and have enabled society to do some amazing things. If you think of fossil fuels as a source of energy, they are efficient. But, fossil fuels are actually a secondary form of energy, and when you consider how conventional fossil fuels are naturally made, the solar conversion efficiency is astonishingly low.

How low? Let’s have a look at how oil is made, and how efficient each step is:

• First, you need sunlight to grow plants, but photosynthesis is only about 1.7% efficient.
• Only about 2% of the biomass that grows is actually preserved, and ends up deeper in the Earth.
• About 74% of the sequestered biomass turns into oil.
• Only about 2.8% of that oil gets trapped.
• Only about 25% of the trapped oil is actually recoverable by humans.
• About 90% of the recovered oil goes to products, since about 10% has to be fueled (usually as natural gas) to run the extraction and refining process.
• Finally, internal combustion engines are only about 20% efficient.

So if you total that all up, fossil fuels are about 0.000003% efficient at converting sunlight to energy. Put another way: If you want one Watt of energy from solar panels, you need about 10 Watts of sunlight. If you want one Watt of energy from biomass, you need about 50 Watts of sunlight. If you want one Watt of energy from oil, you need over three million Watts of sunlight.

The actual number for fossil fuels is 3.15 X 10^6 Watts of sunlight per watt of fossil fueled energy. For you math lovers, that is close to pi million watts of sunlight.

We can also think about this is terms of land area required. If you want to run your house (about 4 kilowatts) for a year, you need about 35,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. If you want to get that energy from solar, you will need about 10 acres of solar panels. To get that energy from biofuels, you will need about 50 acres of farmland. But to get that same amount of energy from fossil fuels, you need the sun to shine on a swath of land about the size of Connecticut, for an entire year, for one house.

That means that if all the land in the United States was devoted to producing energy through continuous sustainable fossil fuel production using the sun and the natural conversion process, the entire United States could only power about 600 homes. But unfortunately for those 600 homes, they would have to wait a couple million years before their energy was delivered.

Fortunately, we currently don’t have to rely on the Earth’s natural fossil fuel formation processes. We have an abundance of oil stored in the crust, and if and when that runs out, we have more efficient ways of making synthetic fossil fuels using biomass than the way the Earth does it naturally. So oil is great, for now, but as it turns out, solar and biomass are much more efficient in the long run.

*The advantage of biofuels should be noted though – that the collector assembles itself. You don’t have to build anything, you basically just throw a seed on the ground and your solar collector grows out of thin air. With solar panels, you have to actually build and transport the collector, which is annoying.

**There may be one tiny exception, and that is tidal power, which is powered by the gravitational forces of both the sun and the moon.

Author’s note: The inspiration for this article came from the Fundamentals of Renewable Energy Processes Class at Stanford University, taught by Dr. Adam Brandt. His inspiration for this calculation came from Dr. Jeffery Duke’s publication, Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar Energy.

About the Author:

Scott McNally is an energy engineer who has spent the past year working on national energy policy issues in Washington, DC. He has worked as an ORISE Fellow with the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Program and an energy and climate researcher with the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Previously, Scott was a project engineer for Shell Oil Company and an environmental engineer for Valero. Scott has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently completing a Masters in Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University. Scott was invited to be a guest blogger by Plugged In’s Melissa C. Lott. You can reach Scott via e-mail at scottmcnally at gmail dot com.

Photo Credit:

1. Photo of solar panel by Andreas Demmelbauer and used under this Creative Commons License

[This post was originally published on February 20 on Scientific American's Plugged In]

Electric vehicles (EVs) have come under siege in the media in the past two years, with several observers pointing to shortcomings like driving range, performance in cold weather and resale value as indicators of their imminent demise. Do we know for sure that EVs will overcome all these challenges? No. But we are seeing impressive year-on-year sales, declining battery costs, a decarbonizing power sector, and cities around the world committed to reducing congestion and local air pollution. For these reasons, EVs should not be dismissed and are among the best options to decarbonize the transport sector while boosting a flagging automotive sector, creating jobs, and reducing local air pollution.

The real question asked by few is this: where should EVs be today? The answer should probably be framed in terms of technological development and a close proxy for measuring development would be another vehicle such as the hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). In Figure 1, you can see new vehicle sales versus over time since the vehicle’s initial market launch (date of introduction in parentheses). This figure shows that all major battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) are on track or doing better than what the Prius HEV was doing at a similar time. Of course, this is not strictly an apples-to-apples comparison (it does not take overall vehicle market into account, nor potential subsidy effects, for example), but does help us evaluate a true answer, beyond the press eager for a fail-or-victory message.

Figure 1. Months Since Market Introduction (Updated Until December 2012)

Source: EVI, MarkLines Database, Nissan, Toyota, hybridcars.com

The truth is, given that EVs were only released in 2011 to a full range of consumers worldwide, a doubling of sales (approximately 120,000 in 2012 vs. 45,000 in 2011) is not bad growth. Of course, the key is to keep this momentum to hit intermediate-to-long-term targets, but still; perhaps the death of EVs is greatly exaggerated?

The simple truth is that EVs are coming along, but they are going through a delicate phase that most new technologies experience in the early years when only so-called “Early Adopters” begin buying the product, being less sensitive to a higher price point. Consider the MP3 player in the late 1990s, before Apple introduced the iPod in 2001.  Another parallel “product” launch was the Internet, which transcended product state and spurred a systematic reinvention of information sharing in a revolution that took years, not days. EVs similarly have the potential to integrate into the power grid and do much more than get you from Point A to Point B.

Bottom line – EVs are a new or (depending on your perspective) revived technology – and as such must pass through several stages of technological development, optimization, and scale-up. Today’s EVs are far better than the models sold a decade ago, but the costs are still high and infrastructure is still being developed. In the next two or three years, there may only be a few tens of thousands of EVs produced and sold around the world, but this period will allow for a much bigger expansion of markets toward the middle of the decade. By 2015, there is a good chance of EVs and plug-in hybrids becoming cost-competitive (or nearly so if including subsidies) with conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles.

The reason EVs (or fuel-cell vehicles for that matter) get lambasted or unequivocally praised is that we are tempted to look for a silver bullet to our energy security, economic, and environmental problems. Yet there is no need for a zero-sum game. Whichever advanced vehicle technology we pursue, at some point we cannot get better efficiencies or lower CO₂emissions from conventional gasoline and diesel cars. Even hybrids will have trouble reaching below 90 grams of CO₂/km. In contrast, plug-in hybrids could go under 90 grams of CO₂/km and full electric vehicles could reach well below 50 grams of CO₂/km in areas with clean electricity. Either way, we need to make a sound investment, and electric vehicles are a far sounder investment than the cost of doing nothing.

The widespread deployment of EVs will take time. The Electric Vehicles Initiative, a coalition of 15 key countries, together has set a target of over 20 million EVs on the road by 2020. This is achievable, but even this will just be a small share (about 2%) of the world’s cars at that point. But it will set the stage for EVs to play an increasingly important role after 2020, and especially by 2030. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that EVs could account for 15% of the world’s vehicle fleet by 2030 and over one half by 2050. But we have to start somewhere.

Besides EVs, there are other promising alternative vehicle configurations, but what is clear is that EVs offer promise by virtue of their energy efficiency, relying on existing infrastructure, and can be considered desirable high-tech consumer products, all of which together makes these vehicles one of the likeliest technological solutions to lowering CO₂ emissions in the transport sector in the next 40 years. However, improving conventional fuel economy and better urban planning and public transit options should be higher near-term priorities in the next 10 to 20 years. These parallel challenges can and need to be achieved, but not at the expense of the broader goal: ensuring reliable, affordable, low-carbon transport.

The promise of an EV is beyond replacing one vehicle type with another; rather EVs offer a clean solution in the near-term as cities try to understand how to best reduce congestion and local air pollution. Car sharing, two-way interactions with the electricity grid, and fleet economies are but three reasons for why the value proposition of EVs is greater than that of yet another hyped vehicle technology.

About the Author

Tali Trigg is an international energy and transport analyst whose expertise is in transportation issues and technologies, with an emphasis on smart growth policies, bus rapid transit (BRT), and electric vehicles (EVs). Mr. Trigg can be found on twitter @talitrigg. He was invited to contribute this guest post by Plugged In’s Melissa C. Lott.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post are the responsibility of its authors and do not in any way reflect those of another organization.

Photo Credit:

1. Photo of two Chevy Volts and a Nissan Leaf charging in parking lot by rudisillart and used under this Creative Commons License.

[This post was originally published on February 12 on Scientific American's Plugged In]