Vehicle Electrification in Mexico: Evaluating Long-Term Grid Capacity Planning and Interplay with Renewable Deployment

Developing a sustainable transition in the developing world requires thorough and coordinated planning for a deep-decarbonization in their economic sectors. Electricity and transportation are the top sectors responsible for local air and greenhouse gas pollution worldwide.¹

An attractive option to address these sectors in a way that provides both local air quality improvements, and broader-scale environmental benefits is through the electrification of the transportation sector, paired with an aggressive rollout of clean energy generation technologies.

In this contribution we utilize an open-source capacity expansion model (SWITCH)² to assess the least-cost options to meet clean energy targets under different EV penetration and charging scenarios for Mexico. For these scenarios, EV projections are adapted to evaluate the potential growth of electricity usage in this country. After pairing multiple databases, we construct city-wide load consumption curves and modify them with the expected EV growth potential, and their modeled charging pattern. We then analyze the impact of different EV charging load re-distribution mechanisms, and their cost and environmental impacts on the Mexican electric grid by 2030.

We finalize this contribution with the introduction of a city-specific environmental justice index focused on transportation that highlights the most promising areas for clean transportation interventions by leveraging on highly spatially-resolved population and pollution data.³

References

[1] European Environment Agency. Sectoral greenhouse gas emissions by IPCC sector https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/change-of-co2-eq-emissions-2

[2] Johnston, J., Henriquez-Auba, R., Maluenda, B., & Fripp, M. (2019). Switch 2.0: a modern platform for planning high-renewable power systems. SoftwareX, 10, 100251.

[3] In review