Zero tailpipe emission vehicles are seen as a promising route to reduce the carbon footprint of transport sector. Therefore, there is a global movement at customer, industry and administration levels to accelerate their adoption.

This paper explores the effect of electric vehicles on the combined emissions reduction from passenger vehicles and power-generation in the island of Tenerife, representative of a small-to-medium isolated system. In order to understand the system response to mass adoption of plug-ins, a high level model of the island’s power-generation system have been developed. Modeling results evidence that projections for future plug-ins selling shares together with current estimation of renewable energy penetration do not bring any benefit to reduce both CO₂ and fuel dependence in the short term with respect to measures focused on fleet fuel economy improvements. An additional exercise, exploring the effectiveness under a scenario where Government targets for renewable energy penetration are met, has been carried out. Simulation results show that optimized charging strategies and significantly larger power and storage capacities are required. Under these conditions, an electrification focus scenario provides a slightly larger overall CO₂ abatement, 4% higher than the scenarios focused on fuel efficiency improvement.