Environmental efficiency of electric vehicles in Europe: a well-to-wheel life cycle assessment-based data envelopment analysis

Abstract

The environmental problems have raised the world demand toward a rapid change in the policy-making to achieve environmental sustainability. Nowadays, the world and especially the European countries have focused the studies and investments on the adoption of the electric vehicle as a way to reduce the effect of environmental burdensand achieve sustainability in the field of e-mobility. For this purpose, this study introduces the first empirical analysis that used Well- to- Wheel LCA method to cover the scenarios of average electricity mix, marginal electricity mix (2015-2020), and renewable energy-based electricity mix (2030-2040) to assess the efficiency of 27 European countries usage of the battery electric vehicles. In order to achieve this, the midpoint method is considered in estimating the environmental impacts of generating one kWh of electricity for each European country utilizing the latest data published by ecoinvent. Based on that, the environmental footprints produced by one kWh of electricity are estimated per country. Then, the well-to-wheel method is applied to calculate the environmental impacts of BEVs using the functional unit per km traveled. The implicit weighting of data envelopment analysis and the expert judgment-based weights that are obtained from the survey of the European Commission's Joint Research Center (JRC) are then modeled to evaluate and compare the footprint efficiency of different electricity mix production scenarios. The results of the efficiency analysis revealed that the countries with the highest efficiency usage for all electricity mix in unrestricted scenarios are France, Finland, and the Netherland. While most of the European countries were observed to be efficient for the renewable energy-based inthe unrestricted DEA scenario. The surprising results appear when the weight restricted scenario of renewable energy-base was put under comparison with the unrestricted scenario of the same type, the result showed that 81.48% of the European countries were considered environmentally efficient for the unrestricted scenario while a drastic change to around 77% of the countries was found to be inefficient in the weight restricted scenario with a score ranging from 0.968 to 0.754. This study can present the roadmap for the policymakers towards decarbonized energy supply in the power generation mix to cut down emissions from all the environmental impact categories.