Power supply disruptions deter electric vehicle adoption in cities in China.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 39019903.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-50447-1 and PMC identifier 11255310.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Electrification plays a crucial role in deep decarbonization. However, electrification and power infrastructure can cause mutual challenges. We use nationwide power outage and electric vehicle adoption data in China to provide empirical evidence on how power infrastructure failures can deter electrification. We find that when the number of power outages per district increases by 1 in a given month, the number of new electric vehicles adopted per month decreases by 0.99%. A doubling of power outages in one year on average across the nation can create a depressed adoption rate for up to a decade, implying a decline of more than $ 31.3 million per year in carbon reduction benefits from electric vehicle adoptions. This paper adds to the policy discussion of the costs of increased power outages due to extreme weather and natural disasters, and the urgency for policy to address this issue to facilitate wide adoption of electrification.