Modeling personal vehicle energy consumption to assess the potential for electrification and decarbonization

This thesis develops a new model of the energy requirements of personal vehicle travel and uses it to evaluate tools to decarbonize the transport sector. Energy use and carbon emissions from transportation are spread across millions of miles of roadways and hundreds of millions of travelers. This diversity of travel patterns makes it challenging to catalogue and predict those quantities and difficult to characterize the mechanisms that drive them. However, a better understanding of transport energy use patterns is needed to find options for reducing personal vehicle energy requirements and greenhouse gas emissions. Existing research on transportation and climate policy often represents energy use in a fundamentally simplified manner. Some research does not account for the effect of usage patterns on technology performance, missing variation in technology impacts across context of use.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Needell, Zachary Adam.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jessika E. Trancik.

• Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/121595

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/121595