Vehicle Electrification: New Challenges and Opportunities for Smart Grids

Nowadays, concerns about climate change have contributed significantly to changing the paradigm in the urban transportation sector towards vehicle electrification, where purely electric or hybrid vehicles are increasingly a new reality, supported by all major automotive brands. Nevertheless, new challenges are imposed on the current electrical power grids in terms of a synergistic, progressive, dynamic and stable integration of electric mobility. Besides the traditional unidirectional charging, more and more, the adoption of a bidirectional interconnection is expected to be a reality. In addition, whenever the vehicle is plugged-in, the on-board power electronics can also be used for other purposes, such as in the event of a power failure, regardless if the vehicle is in charging mode or not. Other new opportunities, from the electrical grid point of view, are even more relevant in the context of off-board power electronics systems, which can be enhanced with new features as, for example, compensation of power quality problems or interface with renewable energy sources. In this sense, this paper aims to present, in a comprehensive way, the new challenges and opportunities that smart grids are facing, including the new technologies in the vehicle electrification, towards a sustainable future. A theoretical analysis is also presented and supported by experimental validation based on developed laboratory prototypes.