Binary choice model for Battery Electric Vehicle : Do solar panels give energy to the choices?

Sammanfattning: Energy production is associated with environmental impairment. Most anxious is the greenhouse gas emissions, which also arise from transportation. If battery electric vehicles should be able to alleviate the problem, they must be charged with environmentally friendly produced electricity. This paper investigates a possible relationship between battery electric vehicles and solar photovoltaic panels in household survey data from ENABLE.EU performed in ten European countries autumn 2017 – spring 2018. Estimated with a logit binary choice model, it is found that the probability that a household owns a battery electric vehicle increases if the household owns solar photovoltaic panels. Furthermore, this increase in probability is higher within countries with a higher market diffusion of battery electric vehicle and solar photovoltaic panels (France and the UK). This suggests that policy encouraging home charging of battery electric vehicles from solar photovoltaic panels that includes an energy storage facility could speed up the transition of the vehicle fleet.