Abstract:

The electrification of transportation has been highlighted as a critical component of climate change mitigation in order to keep global temperatures below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and avoid possibly catastrophic environmental consequences. Despite this, in Canada and most other developed countries, consumers have been slow to adopt electric vehicles. In this paper, a comprehensive set of methods developed by Natural Resources Canada were expanded and applied to calculate the cost of emissions reductions through various EV subsidies. When applying these methods to the proposed EV subsidies in Canada, it was found that the environmental impacts of EVs vary greatly between the provinces and have significant implications on their cost-effectiveness. The results were then used to compare the cost-efficiency of EV subsidies to other investments in climate change mitigation initiatives, and ultimately decide whether EV subsidies are feasible to implement in any of Canada’s provinces.