AVERT Webinars
The AVoided Emissions and geneRation Tool (AVERT) is a free tool that can be used to evaluate emissions changes due to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric vehicle programs, policies, and projects. The tool helps air quality, energy, and transportation planners estimate the county, state, and regional emissions changes from fossil-fueled power plants and displaced fuel-burning vehicles.
Previous AVERT webinars include:
V4.3 Webinar
In April 2024, EPA hosted a webinar demonstrating the capabilities of the most recent update of AVERT and answered questions from webinar attendees. AVERT is a free tool that can be used to evaluate emissions changes due to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric vehicles programs, policies, and projects. The tool helps air quality, energy, and transportation planners estimate the county, state, and regional emissions changes from fossil-fueled power plants and displaced fuel-burning vehicles.
This update included the latest power sector data from 2023 and added energy storage as a new resource for users to include in their scenarios. Users are able to leverage default parameters in the tool to build energy storage charging and discharging profiles, or can modify attributes such as depth of discharge, round-trip efficiency, duration and more.
V4.2 Webinar
In November 2023, EPA hosted a webinar to demonstrate the capabilities of version 4.2 of AVERT. This update improves AVERT’s ability to model electric vehicle scenarios by leveraging the newly published MOtor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) version 4, released by EPA in August 2023. MOVES4 is the latest iteration of EPA’s state-of-the-science modeling system that estimates emissions for mobile sources at the national, county, and project level for criteria air pollutants, greenhouse gases, and air toxics. AVERT v4.2 now includes updated emission factors for light-duty vehicles, transit buses, and school buses, and it extends the model years available from 2020–2025 to 2023–2028.
Speakers:
- Colby Tucker, Senior Policy Analyst, U.S. EPA State and Local Climate and Energy Program
- Pat Knight, Senior Principal, Synapse Energy Economics, Inc.
- Allison DenBleyker, Senior Engineer, Eastern Research Group, Inc.
AVERT version 4.2 slides (pdf)
V4.0 Webinar
In January 2023, EPA released expanded version of the tool—AVERT 4.0—which responds to stakeholder interest in quantifying the emission impacts of electric vehicles. AVERT 4.0 can model the “tailpipe to smokestack” energy and emissions impacts of electric vehicles. With these capabilities, the tool helps users to model electric vehicles, energy efficiency, and renewable energy together as a portfolio, demonstrating the impact and importance of deploying multiple energy strategies together. Results from AVERT 4.0 are presented at county, state, and regional level, which can be easily exported into COBRA, an EPA air quality and health impacts model. With these two tools together, model results can help demonstrate how energy policies and programs can meet air quality, health, equity and economic goals.
Speakers:
- Alejandra Nunez, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Mobile Sources, U.S. EPA Office of Air and Radiation
- Colby Tucker, Senior Policy Analyst, U.S. EPA State and Local Climate and Energy Program
- Pat Knight, Senior Principal, Synapse Energy Economics, Inc.