Exploring Electric Vehicle Adoption: Analyzing Social Tipping Points for Mission LiFE

Anandajit Goswami^[1], Animesh Ghosh^[2] , Prathamesh Avasare^[3]

Disclaimer: Views are personal

The Honorable Prime Minister of India’s clarion call to Mission Life imbibes social tipping dynamics within India’s multicultural context. This mission aims to catalyze a social movement focused on energy and water conservation, sustainable food systems, waste reduction, healthier lifestyles, and e-waste management. The core principle of Mission LIFE is to establish a mass movement to reduce mindless, destructive material, resource, and energy consumption, to promote a more environmentally conscious lifestyle in light of ongoing human-induced climate change. This is especially important because climate change is already causing disasters such as floods, droughts, and heat waves, which could lead to the mass extinction of humanity and other species on Earth. The transport sector is crucial for energy conservation intervention, utilizing social nudges and behavioral changes. NITI Aayog’s latest IESS V3.0 forecasts the transport sector’s energy demand to reach 356.04 Mtoe by 2047. In an ambitious scenario, social nudges and tipping effects have the potential to increase the demand for electric, energy-efficient vehicles across various income and demographic clusters, thereby reducing energy demand and contributing to the Honorable PM’s LIFE vision. However, it is crucial to understand that “social tipping dynamics” involve the interplay of various agents in a society, their actions, and their interactive responses, resulting in structural changes, nudges, and behavioral changes that catalyze the decarbonization pathway. Unless social tipping happens, large-scale uptake or behavioral changes do not happen in society, and decarbonization doesn’t occur. Decarbonization pathways take a certain trajectory as an outcome based on the nature of social tipping dynamics.

To attain such an outcome through social tipping and network effects, societies for the conservation of the planet for the future can only be mobilized through a sense of reflection within human beings by being role models and examples by themselves. As the inner consciousness of individuals around the globe shifts, we anticipate that societies will also adapt accordingly. Such a change will then be useful in impacting people’s behavior towards saving energy and water and will facilitate future planet protection.

Therefore, this shift in people’s behavior will gradually trigger a tipping point in society, sparking a widespread movement to conserve energy and protect the environment for future generations (Peng & Bai, 2024) (Pizziol & Tavoni, 2024). Therefore, for Mission LIFE of India to succeed and contribute to the goal of achieving a net zero economy by 2070, social tipping must become a reality. Only when social tipping sets in, people, through a mass mobilization movement, will start saving energy and water. As social tipping sets in, people will start enhancing renewable energy usage and reducing energy demand through demand management measures using behavioral changes and action. Other countries have already observed this growth in renewable energy usage through social tipping.

Research from around the world indicates that the rapid expansion of renewable energy has reached a critical economic threshold for their adoption. However, a corresponding reduction in fossil fuel demand and a system-wide energy transition have not happened. This is because social tipping dynamics have still not set in to move an energy system completely from fossil fuel-based energy systems to renewable energy-based systems at a global, national, and regional level.

Various actors, tactics by different actors, and a range of conflicts have acted as a hindering factor in enabling this shift from fossil fuel-based systems to renewable energy-based systems of the future. International, national, regional, and local pressure and interest groups frequently employ tactics to obstruct such shifts. However, there is no clear relationship between the tactics of pressure and interest groups and the actual shifts and transitions. The role of national institutions and responses to global and international pressure groups have determined the shifts from fossil fuel-based systems to renewable energy ones in carbon-intensive regions of Europe. Often, the shifts in the systems following social tipping dynamics work like a chaotic pattern in a natural ecosystem, with multiple forces at play to determine a shift or transition catalyzed by social tipping dynamics. Just like in an ecological system, small changes finally create big impacts in society when it comes to shifts from fossil fuels to renewable energy systems (Tàbara et al., 2024).

If Mission Life is to contribute to the future’s net-zero goal, it must be aware of these small nudges within society. Public policy will also influence these nudges, bringing about changes in people’s choices, behaviors, and actions. Evidence for this can be found in Germany, where strong public policy and industry support aligned with a decrease in nuclear energy support. This nudge proved effective, leading to a growth in the solar energy sector and a shift in people’s choices away from nuclear sources of energy. Gradually, as demand picks up through these nudges, the costs of the clean energy transition will also go down in the long run, reducing the upfront costs of solar installations.

This narrative piece, therefore, through Network and Bibliometric analysis^[4] using Vosviewer, explores, with the help of literature on EV adoption, how three nudging dimensions, viz., policy, supply, and demand, can play a vital role in the adoption of EVs in developed and developing countries. For instance, bibliometric data has been analyzed using network analysis techniques to create co-authorship or co-citation networks. The narrative presents diverse viewpoints on the prioritization of nudging dimensions and their impact on EV adoption in both developed and developing countries. A literature review of 3500 papers from various countries forms the basis for developing this perspective. We go through the following steps to determine the viewpoint of this narrative post:

This narrative highlights three dimensions of social nudging for EV adoption. The dimensions are supply, demand, and policy. We have taken into account the following nudge indicators within these dimensions:

Table 1: The Nudging Dimensions and Indicators Considered for The Analysis

Source: Compiled and Created by the Authors’

This narrative develops a nudging tool that prioritizes nudging intervention areas to accelerate EV adoption in the future, extending beyond the conventional financial incentives currently in place. We further explored the interconnection between the nudging dimensions (categorised in clusters of policy, supply, and demand) through a network effect analysis, which presented the following visualization:

The three colors, which can be seen in Figure 2, signify three different perspectives of policy. These perspectives are as follows: –

The blue colour cluster, which emerged from 3500 literature, signifies human centricity, or one can associate it with one’s self-perspective.  The red color cluster, which has emerged from the literature above, indicates the perspective of governance by the formal body. Lastly, the green colour cluster signifies the perspective of the clean and green energy transition. On similar lines, Figures 3 and 4 illustrated the same perspectives in combination of two and three. However, colour significance has changed in those referred figures. The interlinkages between the clusters are determined by the frequency of interlinking arrow and the degree of the interconnection is denoted by the width of the interconnection lines between the clusters.

Based on a review of 3500 papers around the world, the above nudging connections show the type, degree, and frequency of connections between the different policy, supply, and demand indicators of EV adoption. The literature guides the process of calculating a composite score for each nudging indicator across the three dimensions of policy, supply, and demand. Based on the dimensions studied from the literature population of 3500 peer-reviewed published papers, the visual below illustrates how to prioritize each nudging indicator to enable and accelerate EV adoption in both developed and developing countries. We conducted a Monte Carlo simulation to arrive at the composite score of the nudges emerging from the perspective of the 3500 peer-reviewed articles on EV adoption. This simulation provides a randomized trial of nudge scores over a period of time, based on the perspectives arising from the 3500 literature on EV adoption in the global literature.

Figure 5: Composite Score After Monte Carlo Simulation

[1] [2] 

The above visual highlights that on the supply side, life cycle assessment (0.50) plays an important role, followed by demand management measures (0.48) within the demand domain. Economic and behavioral incentives (0.48), which overlap both in the supply and demand domains, also play an important role as a nudging factor within the top 5 nudging enablers.

Within the policy domain, transport policy (0.44) plays a key role among the top five nudging perspectives for EV adoption. Finally, on the supply side, the battery and charging infrastructure plays a crucial role as a nudge enabler to accelerate EV adoption across different countries of the world, as evidenced by literature from both developed and developing nations.

The perspectives emerging on EV adoption behavior and nudging from a literature of 3500 peer-reviewed papers show that a policy push may enable a supply-side push for EV adoption in developed and developing country contexts. In addition, policy and supply-side push work together to start social tipping and demand-side pull. This makes social tipping more effective at encouraging people of all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds to buy electric vehicles, which has a long-lasting effect on society as a whole.

Once such a transition takes place, people’s conviction and belief in clean energy systems may go up further, strengthening their future actions for clean energy choices and adoption. We have observed this phenomenon during the transition to electric vehicles, as discussed in this narrative post.

The global literature also showed a similar trend in the electrification of heating and cooling systems in residential areas of developed societies. However, testing is necessary for developing societies with multiple cultural layers, such as India. This is because, in a developing country like India, subsidies for fossil fuels, energy infrastructure subsidies, the higher gestation period of fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure, and multiple social lock-in effects can delay the effects of social tipping nudges and hinder the transition to clean energy choices by people. International crises like war can also impact people’s behavior, influencing their future energy choices and adoption (Alkemade et al., 2024). For example, in the winter of 2022–23, energy demand in Europe went down, anticipating future high prices due to the escalating war between Russia and Ukraine. Similarly, the energy demand of people across Europe and the world reduced during COVID-19, but again, it rebounded in 2021 at a level that was similar to the energy demand levels of 2019.

Hence, the impact of social tipping dynamics as a nudge and its impact on energy choices, actions, and behavior of people are often impacted by a global or international crisis like a war, terrorism, public health crisis, or natural disaster. The role of MISSION LIFE as a contributory nudge to attain a net zero economy by 2070 through the social tipping dynamics of the EV adoption process in Indian society will therefore also be dependent on these extraneous shocks and crisis events whenever they happen.

Such nudges can become increasingly complex in the national and state contexts of India, a multicultural, federal country with a wide variety of political economies across the center and states. It will therefore need a transdisciplinary lens of social tipping dynamics to understand where MISSION LIFE of India can or might reach in the future in terms of its contribution towards the net zero goal of 2070 of the Indian economy without compromising India’s developmental, quality of life goals, and aspirations for the future with a sense of equity and justice for all sections of society.

References

Alkemade, F., De Bruin, B., El-Feiaz, A., Pasimeni, F., Niamir, L., & Wade, R. (2024). Social tipping dynamics in the energy system. Earth System Dynamics, 15(2), 485–500. https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-485-2024

Peng, Y., & Bai, X. (2024). Identifying social tipping point through perceived peer effect. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 51, 100847. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2024.100847

Pizziol, V., & Tavoni, A. (2024). From niches to norms: the promise of social tipping interventions to scale climate action. Npj Climate Action, 3(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-024-00131-3

Tàbara, J. D., Mangalagiu, D., Frantal, B., Mey, F., Maier, R., Lilliestam, J., Sarrica, M., Mandel, A., Lieu, J., Cottone, P., Veland, S., & Martínez-Reyes, A. (2024). Transformative Emergence: Research Challenges for Enabling Social-ecological Tipping Points Toward Regional Sustainability Transformations. Springer Climate, Part F2470, 325–343. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50762-5_16

^[1] Independent Visiting Research Fellow, ACPET (Ashoka Centre for People Centric Energy Transition)

^[2] Research Fellow, ACPET (Ashoka Centre for People-Centric Energy Transition)

^[3] Research Intern, ACPET (Ashoka Centre for People-Centric Energy Transition)

^[4] Network analysis is broader and can be applied to many types of systems, while bibliometric analysis specifically deals with scholarly literature