The study was recently published in the journal “Energy.” It was completed by scientists from Stanford and the Technical University of Munich, with support from Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project as well as the BMW Group.

“We looked at how large-scale adoption of electric vehicles would affect total energy use in a community, for buildings as well as transportation,” said Markus Felgenhauer, who is the lead author of the study, a former visiting scholar at the Stanford GCEP, and a doctoral candidate at TUM. “We found that investing in all-electric battery vehicles is a more significant economical choice for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, primarily due to their lower cost and significantly higher energy efficiency.”