WP9 Quantification of Environmental Benefits. Deliverable 9.1: Report on External Costs of electricity generation and vehicle use. Deliverable 9.2: Soft link between environmental assessment and the hybrid general equilibrium model. Project: Development of an Evaluation Framework for the Introduction of Electromobility

We quantify environmental benefits attributable to air quality and GHGs pollutants due to electro-mobility. We link ExternE’s Impact Pathway Analysis and the hybrid CGE model in order to relate predicted effects on economy to external costs. To quantify the external costs, environmental and health effects attributable to direct and indirect emissions stemming from domestic economic production, imports, fuel use and electricity production over the period 2008-2030 are estimated. As a result, total external costs and year-by-year differences for business-as-usual and EM+ scenario are computed for Austria. We find that EM+ scenario generates overall smaller externalities, but the year-by-year differences are very small in absolute magnitude, corresponding to about 0.3% reduction in relative terms. Different sectors contribute to the total value of external costs, however. EM+ generates small benefits due to changes in the structure of domestic economic sectors, while changes in vehicle fleet and fuel use solely result in about 2.5 times larger benefits. Annual environmental benefits of EM+ are about 80 to 90 million euros after the year 2025. EM+ scenario also leads to changes in electricity market that would result in damage, rather than benefits, of value about 10 to 33 million euros. This environmental damage is however not sufficiently large to counterbalance the environmental benefits, and hence EM+ is environment-improving policy yielding overall total net benefits.