By Michael Kuser

BOSTON — Private car ownership in cities will be a rarity in five years, but it may take 30 years to get all the gas-guzzling pickup trucks and SUVs off the road.

Those were two extremes of visions for decarbonizing the transportation sector presented Friday at Raab Associates’ 158th New England Electricity Restructuring Roundtable.

Two big challenges in decarbonizing passenger vehicles are geography and scale, said Massachusetts Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack.

“Lyft has pledged that its company alone will provide 1 billion autonomous, electrified rides annually by 2035, which would be far more important if we didn’t make 411 billion trips a year in the United States, meaning that the 1 billion trip goal represents less than one day’s travel — and that’s one day’s travel in 2015, not 2035,” Pollack said.

“That, my friends, is the problem of scale in transportation,” she said. “Sometimes I refer to it as the ‘denominator’ problem. We talk about the numerator — we’re going to have 300,000 electric cars, we’re going to have a billion trips — and we forget the denominators, and in transportation they’re enormous.”

Inundating Innovation

“As we sit here today in this low-lying seaport/innovation district — someone in the audience said ‘inundation district’ — the announcement yesterday that Antarctic annual ice loss has tripled in the last decade, and now stands at 219 billion tons of ice per year, should continue to instill a sense of urgency in these matters for all of us,” said moderator Jonathan Raab.

“Although this is our Electricity Restructuring Roundtable — and the electrification of cars is often viewed as the panacea for reducing carbon in the transportation sector — we should not forget the critical importance of strategies to reduce VMT, or vehicle miles traveled in personal vehicles, through mass transit, shared mobility, biking, walking, telecommuting and other strategies, as well as making transportation more efficient generally,” Raab said.

Robert Klee, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, boasted that his state, though small, is keeping up with its neighbors in offshore wind procurements and even moving ahead in setting interim goals for greenhouse gas reduction, highlighting the passage earlier this month of Public Act 18-82 (Senate Bill 7).

The department had announced Wednesday that the state will purchase 200 MW of output from Deepwater Wind’s Revolution Wind project, adding to Rhode Island’s 400-MW procurement. (See Conn. Awards 200-MW OSW, 50-MW Fuel Cell Deals.)

“As Massachusetts is thinking about their interim goals, we’ve actually put them into law, so for 2030, there are 45% reductions in greenhouse gas,” Klee said. “We took where we are today, and where we have to go by statute — 80% by 2050 from 2001 levels — drew basically a straight line, that’s 45% by 2030. That is actually the most ambitious target in the country right now.”

Transportation represents 36% of the state’s GHG emissions, “and that means we have to do a whole lot on deployment of zero-emission vehicles, and transit, and it’s an all-of-the-above strategy for Connecticut,” Klee said.

The state is also pushing against federal rollbacks by working with other states, such as through the U.S. Climate Alliance, he said. It also joined the Transportation and Climate Initiative with eight other states in the Northeast to consider a cap-and-trade system for transportation similar to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in place for the power sector.

Ridesharing Fix

Corey Ershow, Lyft’s transportation policy manager for the Eastern U.S., wants to help tackle Pollack’s denominator problem through ridesharing, which cuts total VMT by increasing the number of passengers in a vehicle.

“About three-quarters of commuters not only drive to work every day, but they’re doing so alone, which shouldn’t be all that surprising, but it does cause significant problems — $160 billion a year in congestion costs, and 40,000 American fatalities last year,” Ershow said.

Historically, we haven’t given people a lot of options, he said. “Either you take mass transit, which is great if you live right along an existing route, and it’s operating at high capacity, but that’s not the case everywhere,” Ershow said. “As a result, car ownership looks pretty appealing.”

In the vast majority of use cases, a private vehicle is going to be the fastest way to get from point A to point B in an era in which we are placing an increasing price premium on time, he said.

“But ridesharing has proven demand for an alternative,” Ershow said. “This is going to become that much more ubiquitous as we move into autonomous vehicles,” which when shared on a platform like Lyft could mean dramatic reductions in VMT numbers in the U.S.

The company projects that within five years, fully autonomous vehicles will provide the majority of Lyft rides across the country, and by 2025, private car ownership will all but end in major U.S. cities, he said.

Mechanical engineering professor John Heywood of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that huge swaths of the country are outside urban areas, and drivers who live in rural areas are more prone to be concerned about the range of an EV.

“Long recharging times are also an issue, because if you up the power, you fry the battery,” Heywood said. “Most EVs must recharge at home, and they do 90% of their recharging at home, and 90% of EV buyers buy a home recharger. But how many homes have that potential? Our current estimate is about a third of the 110 million homes in the U.S. So that’s a constraint that we haven’t yet found a way around.”

Efficiency and EVs

Ben Haley, cofounder of Evolved Energy Research, posited three pillars supporting a deep decarbonization strategy for the transportation sector — electrification, energy efficiency and electricity decarbonization.

Reducing carbon emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, Haley said, would require a threefold increase in the share of energy from electricity, coupled with efficiency gains to reduce per capita energy use by 40%. But even that is not enough, he said.

“Even with energy efficiency, electrification increases load precipitously, but as we are doing that we’re also needing to bring on renewable resources or other decarbonized resources to lower the emissions intensity about 90%,” Haley said.

“These are sobering numbers, undoubtedly,” he said. “Per capita energy use needs to drop, which can be through a combination of electrification, fuel efficiency, a reduction in service demand through conservation or reimagining of service demand through mobility — all of those can reduce energy. Every unit of energy we don’t demand means we don’t have to build a system to support that.”

Evangeline Levesque, executive director of sustainable transport and electrification policies for the Quebec Ministry of Transportation, said her province is in the middle of a five-year, $420 million plan to electrify its transportation.

“Quebec has a lot of clean, renewable energy,” Levesque said, referring to the province’s vast hydropower resources. “As it is, we have a lot of it. As it is not too expensive, it was the obvious treatment.”

The difference between Quebec and New England is that it funds its decarbonization programs through an active carbon market, being part of the Western Climate Initiative with Ontario and California. The province set a target of $500 million of investment and 5,000 jobs in the EV industry by 2020, by when it aims to have 100,000 EVs registered.

Monumental Shift

Terence Sobolewski, chief customer officer for National Grid, acknowledged the barriers mentioned by other speakers, such as consumer awareness, high cost and EV model availability. But he said that building charging infrastructure was the most important step now, in the early stages of the industry.

To achieve 80% GHG reductions by 2050, “we need to have half of our light duty fleet be electric by the year 2030, [for which] you actually need to have 100% of sales [be] electric at least two or three years before that to effect that transition,” Sobolewski said.

“That means that in less than 10 years, every car and light duty truck sold in the Northeast would have to be electric,” he said. “That’s a monumental consumer shift we’re talking about achieving.”