United States Department of Transportation
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Municipal Fleet Vehicle Electrification and Photovoltaic Power In the City of Pittsburgh.
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2016-01-01
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Abstract:This document reports the results of a cost benefit analysis on potential photovoltaic projects
in Pittsburgh and electrifying the city’s light duty civilian vehicle fleet. Currently the
city of Pittsburgh has a civilian passenger vehicle fleet of 118 vehicles travelling 718,000
miles a year. This leads to an average (5 days a week) travel of 23.4 miles per work day per
vehicle. We used a gasoline price of range of $1.50, $2.00 and $2.50 a gallon and electric
price range of 4, 6 and 10 cents per kWh. We found that conventional vehicles would likely cost less to operate over 15 years than electric vehicles. This is due to the increased capital
costs involved in purchasing the vehicles and charging stations, as well as the amount of miles
these vehicles travel per year. To account for the of impacts of vehicle electrification on
emissions we calculated the CO2, NOx and SO2 emissions from both a conventional and electric
fleet. For electricity emissions we investigated several electric grid assumptions
including current regional grid average, current regional grid marginal at night, current regional grid with 30% RECs, and a regional grid starting with 30% RECs and increasing to 100%
over 15 years. The city is currently purchasing RECs for 30% of its municipal power needs.
For GHG emissions, we found that EVs in Pittsburgh save GHGs compared to conventional
gasoline vehicles in 3 of our 4 current electricity grid assumptions. As the GHG-‐intensity
of the grid improves over the next 15 years, BEVs have clear GHG advantages over conventional
gasoline vehicles in Pittsburgh. The City of Pittsburgh has indicated if will transition to purchasing RECs for 100% of governmental energy use by 2030. While there challenges with
attributing local air pollutant reductions directly to RECs on a one-‐to-‐one basis, the ombination of existing and proposed EPA power plant regulations and REC purchases highly
increase the likelihood of a cleaner grid profile going forward. Yet SO2 emissions from
the power sector remain problematic in a social net present cost analysis. SO2 was the highest
cost pollutant for vehicle externalities and is not emitted in significant amount from gasoline combustion. Because of the SO2 emissions, vehicle electrification was also found to
be likely to have higher total social emissions costs than gasoline options under most
cases. A faster reduction in power plant air emissions improves the outlook for lectrification.
One way of offsetting these emissions is to ensure that a portion of the needed electricity
is generated from renewable or low-‐emission sources. Photovoltaic (PV) generation is one possible renewable source to consider for distributed generation in an urban region.
One potential location for PV cells would be on city-‐owned parking facilities. Canopies could
be built over city-‐owned surface lots or on the tops of city-‐owned garages. Currently
the Pittsburgh Parking Authority maintains 10 downtown parking garages, with parking on the roofs, and 1 unshaded downtown surface level lot. The total surface area of these garages’
roofs and the lot was found to be approximately 52,000 square meters. We estimated a peak
capacity of about 6,000 kW of PV is possible on these facilities. The amount of electricity
potentially generated from these PV systems could power between 24 and 27 million
miles of electric vehicle travel per year, which is more than 30 times the yearly travel of the city’s civilian passenger vehicle fleet. The PV systems were found to have positive net
present values, including the value of decreased pollution.
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