Assessing the potential of fuel cell-powered and battery-powered forklifts for reducing GHG emissions using clean surplus power; a game theory approach

This work aims at developing a game theory model for assessing the potential of fuel cell-powered and battery-powered forklifts for reducing GHG emissions in the province of Ontario, Canada. Two stakeholders are considered in the developed model: government and energy consumer. The energy consumer, which is assumed to be an industrial facility, operates 150 diesel forklifts but has the option of replacing them with fuel cell-powered and battery-powered forklifts. The government can encourage this replacement by allocating a percentage of Ontario's surplus power to the energy consumer at a discounted price. The discount is assumed to be exempting the energy consumer from paying the global adjustment. As a result, the energy consumer only pays the hourly Ontario electricity price when discounted power is available. Discounted electricity will decrease the cost of operating battery-powered and fuel cell-powered forklifts for the energy consumer and will encourage it to use those technologies instead of diesel forklifts. The government has an incentive to pursue such policy as the replacement of diesel forklifts with fuel cell-powered and battery-powered forklifts will reduce GHG emissions and subsequently, the social cost of carbon in the province. The reults of our modeling show that when the government does not allocate discounted power to the energy consumer, energy consumer does not reduce emissions and keeps using its 150 diesel forklifts. However, when the government provides 0.1% of Ontario's surplus power at each hour to the energy consumer at a discounted price, the energy consumer replaces 31 of its diesel forklifts with battery-powered forklifts. When the percentage of discounted power is 0.6% of Ontario's surplus power at each hour, energy consumer replaces 91 of its diesel forklifts with battery-powered forklifts and 54 of its diesel forklifts with fuel cellpowered forklifts.