Electric vehicles will contribute to emissions reductions in the United States, but their charging may challenge electricity grid operations. We present a data-driven, realistic model of charging demand that captures the diverse charging behaviours of future adopters in the US Western Interconnection.
A range of grid models are used in the literature on EV charging impact, including models of transmission 9, 28, unit commitment 25, 34 and others 29, 32. The reduced-order dispatch model proposed by Deetjen and Azevedo 57 is fast and computationally inexpensive, allowing us to compute and compare many scenarios.
The capacity of the grid to support EVs is limited by the maximum total capacity of the generators in each week of the year. To test capacity and study impacts at lower adoption levels, we scale the output of the model for EV charging demand at 100%, assuming a constant distribution of adoption.
Increasing the capacity of gas and coal by 10% is sufficient to eliminate the need for grid storage to cover charging for 50% EV adoption, as both the added capacity and the grid storage act like peakers. Only solar and wind change ramping or the amount of excess non-fossil fuel generation as both those results depend on the profile of net demand.
Major components of the electric grid. This depiction illustrates that the electric network acts as an essential connector between new, emerging technologies such as solar, wind, EVs, and DER.
Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative Electric vehicles will contribute to emissions reductions in the United States, but their charging may challenge electricity grid operations.