Vehicle Technologies Program Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) Report for Fiscal Year 2012
TR-OSTI-GEN_0164
03/01/2012
- Content
- The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy has defined milestones for its Vehicle Technologies Program (VTP). This report provides estimates of the benefits that would accrue from achieving these milestones relative to a base case that represents a future in which there is no VTP-supported vehicle technology development. Improvements in the fuel economy and reductions in the cost of light- and heavy-duty vehicles were estimated by using Argonne National Laboratory’s Autonomie powertrain simulation software and doing some additional analysis. Argonne also estimated the fraction of the fuel economy improvements that were attributable to VTP-supported development in four “subsystem” technology areas: batteries and electric drives, advanced combustion engines, fuels and lubricants, and materials (i.e., reducing vehicle mass, called lightweighting”). Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s MA3T (Market Acceptance of Advanced Automotive Technologies) tool was used to project the market penetration of light-duty vehicles, and TA Engineering’s TRUCK tool was used to project the penetrations of medium- and heavy-duty trucks. Argonne’s VISION transportation energy accounting model was used to estimate total fuel savings, reductions in primary energy consumption, and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would result from achieving VTP milestones. These projections indicate that by 2030, the on-road fuel economy of both light- and heavy-duty vehicles would improve by more than 20%, and that this positive impact would be accompanied by a reduction in oil consumption of nearly 2 million barrels per day and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of more than 300 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year. These benefits would have a significant economic value in the U.S. transportation sector and reduce its dependency on oil and its vulnerability to oil price shocks.
- Citation
- Ward, J., Stephens, T., and Birky, A., "Vehicle Technologies Program Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) Report for Fiscal Year 2012," SAE Technical Paper TR-OSTI-GEN_0164, 2012, .