Uncontrolled Electric Vehicle Charging Impacts on Distribution Electric Power Systems with Primarily Residential, Commercial or Industrial Loads

An increase in Electric Vehicles (EV) will result in higher demands on the distribution electric power systems (EPS) which may result in thermal line overloading and low voltage violations. To understand the impact, this work simulates two EV charging scenarios (home- and work-dominant) under potential 2030 EV adoption levels on 10 actual distribution feeders that support residential, commercial, and industrial loads. The simulations include actual driving patterns of existing (non-EV) vehicles taken from global positioning system (GPS) data. The GPS driving behaviors, which explain the spatial and temporal EV charging demands, provide information on each vehicles travel distance, dwell locations, and dwell durations. Then, the EPS simulations incorporate the EV charging demands to calculate the power flow across the feeder. Simulation results show that voltage impacts are modest (less than 0.01 p.u.), likely due to robust feeder designs and the models only represent the high-voltage (primary) system components. Line loading impacts are more noticeable, with a maximum increase of about 15%. Additionally, the feeder peak load times experience a slight shift for residential and mixed feeders (approximate to 1 h), not at all for the industrial, and 8 h for the commercial feeder.

Automated summary

The study simulated the impact of EV charging on distribution electric power systems, showing modest voltage impacts but a noticeable increase in line loading of about 15%. Different types of feeders experience slight shifts in peak load times.