The spatiotemporal distribution of pollutants plays a significant role in determining their impact on ecosystems and human health. In her latest paper alongside fellow authors, Ann Xu proposes a strategy for calculating the spatiotemporal operational emissions of road transportation and the electric grid to effectively quantify the environmental impact of transportation electrification — considering emissions from internal combustion engine vehicles and offsetting emissions from electric vehicles (EVs) and utilizing actual transportation networks and travel data.

The study estimates the spatiotemporal charging demand for different types of EVs, accounting for their behavioral patterns, and maps the demand onto the electrical bus infrastructure within the power grid, before demonstrating the effectiveness of the methodology through the simulation of ten scenarios on a Texas grid with 7,000 geographically sited electrical buses, incorporating both current and future generator data.