Associate Professor

Director

Low energy: Estimating electric vehicle electricity use​

Are EVs a good substitute for gasoline cars? One way to start to answer this question is to look at how people are driving their EVs, as measured by “electric vehicle miles traveled” (eVMT). Fiona Burlig, Jim Bushell, Catherine Wolfram and I provide the first at-scale estimate of EV home charging by matching 12 billion observations of hourly electricity usage with EV registration data. The average EV increases overall household load by 2.9 kilowatt-hours per day, less than half the amount assumed by state regulators. We then scale this up to account for away-from-home charging to estimate annual eVMT. Our results imply that plug-in hybrids travel 1,700 miles per year on electricity and battery electrics 6,700 miles per year, both far below miles traveled in gasoline cars.

Subsidizing mass adoption of electric vehicles

Little is known about demand for EVs in the mass market. Erich Muehlegger and I analyze a natural experiment from California to examine how sensitive low- and middle-income households are to the price of EVs. Using these results, we then calculate the expected subsidy bill required for California to reach its goal of 1.5 million EVs by 2025. Our estimates place the total bill at upwards of $12-$18 billion, a figure that includes both California subsidies as well as any federal subsidies that may exist going forward.