The Impact of state policies on electric vehicle adoption -A panel data analysis

Abstract

Using data from fifty U.S. states between 2012 and 2020, the impacts of three types of state level policies on electric vehicles (EV) adoption are examined: 1) policies that mitigate the environmental impacts from energy production, 2) policies that provide financial incentives to consumers for EV purchase, and 3) policies that provide publicly available EV charging infrastructure. With a dependent variable of EV registration per 100,000 population, impacts are assessed with a panel data, fixed effects model. Statistically significant coefficient results are found for environmental, financial, and charging infrastructure policies. Computations of policy changes across four states with low environmental performance and no financial incentives show that increasing renewable and/or nuclear energy sources in the energy mix or reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from electricity generation have larger impacts on EV adoption than either financial incentives or publicly available charging infrastructure. This research demonstrates the need to both coordinate and nationalize policies that enhance low GHG energy sources in order to uniformly improve EV adoption across all states.