The distributed environmental benefits from driving electrical vehicles— evidence from China

Electric vehicles rapidly expand in China during the past decade. The expansion is often justified for the environmental benefits from fleet electrification. However, the magnitude of such benefits depends on many contextual factors and we need country-specific evaluations. We provide such an evaluation. The results are mixed. While adopting an electric vehicle helps mitigate CO₂ emission and induces climate benefits, the much-expected environmental benefit of EVs in terms of improving local air quality can only be achieved under an ultra-low emission grid. Further, we compare the short-run environmental impacts of fleet electrification, largely motivated by China's intensive EV subsidies, against the much enhanced 2013–2014 subsidy schemes that become quite ambitious during 2013–2014. It is revealed that the ambitious subsidies cannot be justified by the short-run environmental benefits, even when the global and local pollution mitigation benefits are both taken into consideration. Finally, jurisdictions that extensively import electricity may divert part of the environmental damage caused by driving of EVs to other regions, however, the local damage is still comparable, or even exceeds that associated with driving a gasoline vehicle. We contribute to the existing literature in two ways: 1) we examine the marginal changes in emissions and health consequences of fleet electrification in China; 2) we explicitly deal with both direct and indirect flows across provincial electricity grids in mainland China.