Written by Yi-Jen Shih, Postdoctoral Fellow of RSPRC ; Edited by Tung-Yu Lu, Project Executive of RSPRC
On the 30th of November 2023, the Risk Society and Policy Research Center (RSPRC) of National Taiwan University hosted an open forum by Associate Professor Pietro Lanzini from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. His research interests include consumer behavior and sustainability, with a special focus on mobility, the food sector and spillover-related phenomena. The title of his presentation was "The Electrification of Mobility in Italy: A Commuter-based Perspective."
At the same time, RSPRC also invited two professional scholars to be the discussants of the forum. One is Professor Dai-Gee Shaw, who is the Adjunct Research Fellow of Economics at Academia Sinica, and another is Professor Shyue-Koong Chang, who is from the Department of Civil Engineering at National Taiwan University.
In the beginning, Professor Lanzini introduced four parts of his presentation, including sustainability, the role of private mobility on environmental degradation, electrification and key involved actors, and commuter-based perspectives.
Professor Lanzini started with a summary of what is sustainability. He recognized sustainability does matter, and criticized some politicians who choose to disagree with the relevance of climate change. Considering the payback of investments in climate change might be many years from now, these politicians worried that their elections will be affected, and they prefer a short-term approach to climate change, which of cost is not paying.
Professor Lanzini illuminated there exists different types of environmental degradation and environmental problems. Some of these are more local effects, and other problems are more complex on the global scale, such as rising temperatures with increasing extreme climate events. More and more people are becoming aware of the problems connected with sustainability. Referring to the Global Risk Report 2023 from the World Economic Forum (WEF), he also argued that climate change is a complex multi-dimensional and multi-stakeholder issue. Failure to respond to climate change is one of the most severe risks facing the world. Climate-related negative consequences not merely influence the environment, but also business, finance, entire GDP of countries, industrial sectors and so on.
In the second part, Professor Lanzini discussed the role of private mobility on environmental degradation in Italy. Compared with energy production and other sectors, transportation is the most important climate change contributor in Italy. 24.5% of greenhouse gas emissions are due to transportation, and actually, more than half of it is private mobility. In other words, private mobility is responsible for roughly 15% of greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the different single pollutants, around 20% of NOX, 10% of CO, 10% of PM2.5 and 23% of CO2 are due to individual private mobility. Furthermore, only 2.5% out of 10% of PM2.5 stems from tailpipe emissions. In short, most of them comes from other sources, such as the tires that we consume, and the brakes when we slow down. This is not going to be affected by electrification. Therefore, most of PM2.5 would still exist even if we shift to electric. He stressed that although electrification is good for the environment, it is much more complex than it might appear.
Another critical question is the source of electricity for electric vehicles. Professor Lanzini explained that Italy is already exploiting most of the renewable energies. Most likely the needed electricity is going to be produced using traditional power plants. Therefore, the electrification of vehicles is just shifting the problem from urban centers to other places, but the environment will be also polluted in another way.
In the third part, Professor Lanzini further portrayed three trends in the Italian automotive industry and mobility at large, including electrification, servitization, and industrial restructuring. Servitization is related to the topic of mobility as a service, which reflects more and more young people in Europe relying on shared mobility or public transportation instead of owning a vehicle.
The most main trend of the Italian automotive industry is industrial restructuring, and Professor Lanzini provided two potential impacts. First, it takes fewer people to produce electric vehicles compared to traditional vehicles, which increases the unemployment rate. The second impact is huge debates from geo-political and strategic concerns. In fact, Italy lacks of sufficient raw materials. What makes things worse is that the industries can't construct needed batteries, which are the fundamental elements of electric vehicles. Therefore, the government of Italy is forced to purchase batteries from China. In the meantime, however, the Italian government worries if this would cause any diplomatic disputes between the two countries.
The fourth part covered the consumer-based perspective, which is related to Professor Lanzini and his colleagues' ongoing research project. Comparing between Italy and Brazil, the project mainly analyzes perceptions about electric vehicles' benefits and concerns, examines psychological models for developing intentions to purchase electric vehicles, and finds out common traits and specificities in the two different contexts.
Using the cross-sectional investigation based on a sample of 1,087 consumers, Professor Lanzini highlighted the development phases of vehicle electrification. Electrification is perceived as zero-emission mobility in the initial phases, therefore, most of the consumers expressed optimism about purchasing electric vehicles. This leads to consumers becoming more educated about the according pros and cons related to the issues As the platform of public debates builds, optimism fades on the contrary. What about the overall environmental impacts? Although electrification is very good from the point of view of environmental impacts, consumers no longer think naively that electrification account all benefits to net emissions.
Also, automobile industries are experiencing a shift in the relevance of different concerns. In Italy, the main concerns have been the cost of purchase and the driving range in the past five years, and these two aspects are now losing relevance due to new technologies. The cost of purchase is narrowing down the gap between electric vehicles and traditional vehicles.
Professor Lanzini proposed that the availability of infrastructures and geo-political leverage are the two factors that have become more salient. With 40 million cars running on the streets in Italy, 0.5% of them are fully electric nowadays. If the percentages of full-electric vehicles increase dramatically in the following years, it seems impossible to have enough infrastructures. The extended problem is if one company is spending money to promote infrastructures, it not only benefits itself but also all its competitors. Thus many free riders would possibly arise, which implies that every single company presumes that other companies would also be focusing on this. This way, there would end up nobody willing to conduct information about the availability of infrastructures. As for the political leverage, it is because Italy is not independent from the point of view of raw materials, batteries and so on. This is an issue that is gaining relevance, especially after what happened in Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022, which has caused the lagging behind of automotive industry.
Following Professor Lanzini's presentation, Professor Shaw stated his perspective of left cycle analysis of the electrification of mobility. He raised main benefits of electric vehicles, including controlling air pollution, reducing GHG emissions, and promoting public health. However, he also emphasized two potential implications. The first is to make the supply of resources sufficient, efficient, and sustainable. This is because more extensive use of metals, chemicals or energies to produce the batteries and the charging stations may cause adverse impacts on the environment. The second focuses on developing renewable energies to make the supply of energy sufficient, efficient, and sustainable. Professor Shaw stressed that electric vehicles are much more energy efficient than internal combustion energy vehicles.
Professor Lanzini addressed Professor Shaw's responses about how to produce all the needed electricity. This is a huge challenge with many debates because Italy worries about not being able to cope with the demand of mass electrification of vehicles.
After Professor Lanzini's responses, Professor Chang shared several dimensions of the electrified mobility policies in Taiwan, adding to Professor Lanzini's research. The first dimension is Taiwan's policy plans. In Taiwan, only 4% of all 4 million motorcycles are electric motorcycles, and 1.5% of all 7.6 million cars are electric cars. Therefore, the Taiwan government proposed clear national plans to increase the proportion of electric vehicles by 2040, which means the annual market for electric cars is about 420,000 to 450,000, and almost 1 million new electric motorcycles. Otherwise, around 11,700 city buses will be electrified by 2030. Moreover, combined with the parking policy at the city level, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) decided to subsidize the charging station, about 4,400 in the coming two years.
Professor Chang also introduced Taiwan's electric bus policies. The total number of buses in Taiwan is approximately 30,000, but only around 11,7000 city buses will be electrified by 2030. However, MOTC kept watching other possibilities and initiated the fuel cell bus trial. This trail will be a special concession encouraging local governments and bus manufacturers. Professor Chang also criticized that Taiwan currently doesn't have a clear national plan regarding the electrified truck policies.
The second dimension shared by Professor Chang was several national net-zero transportation policies. These policies encompass electrification and zero-emission vehicles, green transportation and shared mobility. Professor Chang highlighted that Taiwan already has built up electric motorcycle sharing systems and shared hybrid cars in several cities, combined with the high-speed track operations. Taiwan also construct the integrated services mechanism, bundle pricing for providing the integration of public transport and shared mobility. Last but not the least, Professor Chang also mentioned the management of motorized vehicles and the transit-oriented development strategies.
Finally, Professor Chang emphasized that Taiwan has invested a lot of resources in promoting public transport systems, so we should encourage the use of public transportation instead of electrifying all vehicles. In response to questions about subsidizing, Professor Lanzini explained the cost of purchasing electric vehicles. Although purchasing electric vehicles has an initial high cost, the total cost of ownership is no big difference because of financial incentives and tax credits.
In the Q&A session, the audiences put forth three questions including the willingness to invest in climate actions, marketing of electric vehicles, and the possibility of changing individual behaviors through legal regulations. In response, Professor Lanzini primarily stated that consensus among different countries will strengthen willingness to invest in climate issues. Secondly, purchasing electric vehicles is not only about electrification, but about the choice between private mobility in general and public transportation. The choices will be influenced by two parts. One is whether electric vehicle owners have their charging stations, and another one is the price of batteries. Lastly, Professor Lanzini emphasized it is not a good idea to have a mandatory law providing for the acquisition of electric vehicles.
In conclusion, Professor Chou Kuei Tian, Director of RSPRC, agreed that the development of electric vehicles is the trend to end fossil fuel mobilities, which is the one way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. However, he also noted that electric vehicles in the production process may increase carbon dioxide, and the way to encourage electric vehicles is to concentrate on the pollution source and the transformation of power generation.
