Global Climate and Air Quality Benefits of Road Transport and Building Electrification

Abstract:

Energy use in road transport and commercial and residential buildings is a key contributor to climate change and air pollution. One option to achieve a transition to a sustainable future in these sectors is to replace fossil fuels by electricity generated from clean sources.

In this study, we systematically explore global pathways for electrification, and the implications for climate, air quality and human health. We build a large set of scenarios by identifying potential key drivers of electrification and subsequently reviewing the literature to define plausible ranges for projected values of the corresponding model parameters. We categorise these drivers into four groups: energy prices, end-use technology costs, energy supply-side technological progress, and broader enabling conditions, including related behavioural and policy aspects. The resulting range of electrification rates largely covers the spread found in multi-model comparisons, with the advantage that differences across scenarios can be fully attributed to the literature-based exogenous assumptions for the four categories. We apply methods recently developed in the machine learning domain to assess the contribution of each category to the overall variability in electrification rates.

While the cost evolution of end-use technologies plays an important role for electrification, the enabling conditions are at least as important in many regions. Climate policy tends to be the major determining factor of electrification rates. Electrification brings air quality benefits at global level, with particularly strong gains in Sub-Sahara Africa and South-East Asia, highlighting the opportunities of electrification for sustainable development. Electrification avoids 110 (30-270) thousand premature deaths due to air pollution globally in the year 2050 compared to a counterfactual with current electrification rates. More ambitious climate policy and favourable conditions for electrification cover the higher end of the range. Combining electrification with a decarbonisation of the power grid raises the health benefits of electrification with 3-13% (8-21%) under current (2°C) climate policies. An ambitious and encompassing policy perspective is therefore warranted to maximize the gains for climate, air quality and health simultaneously.