California Air Resources Board

Principal Investigator/Author: Stephen Ritchie

Contractor: University of California, Irvine

Contract Number: 19RD026

Project Status: Completed June 2024

Relevant CARB Programs: Emissions Monitoring & Control

Topic Areas: Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Mobile Sources & Fuels

Research Summary:

California needs to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and criteria pollutants from on-road heavy-duty vehicles (HDV) and off-road equipment (ORE) in order to meet its air quality and climate goals. Currently the CARB funds incentive programs to deploy low-carbon transportation (LCT) technology vehicles and powertrains to meet the operating requirements of heavy-duty and off-road vehicles. However, the benefit to the overall market, and the long-term health and economic impacts from these incentive programs is harder to quantify. Additionally, new strategies need to be designed to further incentivize the uptake of LCT that address remaining barriers to adoption and which target previously unexplored sectors. The objective of this project is to identify potential policy and incentive strategies that promote greater adoption of LCT (zero and near-zero carbon and pollutant emissions) in the heavy-duty and off-road sectors. This project will create an incentive program performance evaluation tool to quantify benefits of CARB incentive programs and design new strategies to increase the uptake of LCT technologies. The contractor will: 1) synthesize current incentive programs and analyze their effect on LCT uptake among HDV and ORE; 2) develop an incentive program performance evaluation tool that quantifies the emissions reductions, health and ancillary benefits and cost-effectiveness of LCT incentive programs; 3) recommend incentive strategies by vehicle and vocation types, and at varying geographic scales (State, regional and community level); and 4) forecast LCT technologies' attainment of cost parity or market acceptance relative to conventional technologies without incentive program supports. The results will guide future incentive and regulatory programs to meet air quality and climate goals.

Keywords: heavy-duty vehicles (HDV); off-road; greenhouse gas (GHG); incentives; emissions; transportation; low-carbon transportation (LCT)

Research Seminar

Final Report: Please email research@arb.ca.gov to request the final report generated by this research contract.