Electric vehicle market penetration impact on transport-energy-greenhouse gas emissions nexus: A case study of United Arab Emirates

United Arab Emirates is a unique transport market; it stems from a strong end user ownership and allows for extensive user ship owing to a well develop transport infrastructure, making transport sector as the second highest pollutant. In order to curb its greenhouse gas emissions and meet its pre-allotted quota of Kyoto protocol and COP21 targets, alternative routes via greener solution integration into the status quo is a need and a necessity. In this work, we focused on zero emission electric vehicles and evaluated its market penetration by observing GHG emission behavioral response via three-prong transport-energy-greenhouse gas emissions strategy. First, we studied the transport and energy sectors mutually exclusively with in-depths analysis of market trends, trends by manufacturers, emission standards and prioritized advancements for each as a theoretical study. Second, we calculated the overall GHG emission patterns via EV penetration as a macro-level analysis for the entire of the United Arab Emirates transport industry using 1-10% market penetration from both the transport and energy industry independently, in which we observed conflicting emission trends. This was performed to understand the overall impact of electric vehicle on the pollution statistics. Thirdly, we integrated the macro findings with private vehicle market in Abu Dhabi using residential statistics as a case study, using building specifications as input in DesignBuilder and simulated using EnergyPlus, to understand the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions impact on the micro-level, where we recorded a 6.7-8.4% emission differential with only a 5% market penetration, as a n example, over long-term using LEAP. Which makes belief that the current ecosystem is not suitable for EVs in UAE and that major improvements across government/private platforms are needed as reflected in various major policy recommendations to government entities. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.