IMPACT ANALYSIS OF PLUG-IN ELECTRIC VEHICLES ON THE REAL RESIDENTIAL DISTRIBUTION NETWORK

Abstract

The growing share of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the personal automobile market is expected to accelerate in the years to come. With increased demand at a household level, technical problems such as transformer and feeder overloading are likely to emerge. Therefore, this highlights the need for a comprehensive impact analysis framework for EVs to overcome the challenges ahead. A smoother transition, exploiting scalable performance indicators, to Low Voltage (LV) networks with this new form of demand could be achieved as imminent problems can be computed in a realistic manner. To this end, the impact analysis framework is proposed and the corresponding performance indicators are formulated to be used by researchers and/or Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) for different purposes. Under different scenarios, the impacts of EVs on the real underground unbalanced three-phase network are comprehensively explored considering household voltage profiles, transformer-loading, utilization of feeders, and daily total energy losses. For the summer and winter seasons, three cases covering all possible circumstances are investigated: without EVs, with EVs, and a worst-case scenario where all EVs connect at the same time. From the study, it can be deduced that the impact of EVs on the network and household voltage could reach unacceptable levels, and diversifying the connection times of EVs is vital to coping with potential problems posed by residential-level participation in EVs.