Guest editorial: Special Issue on Electric Vehicles and Their Integration with Power Grid

ecarbonization of transport via replacing fossil fueled vehicles with electric ones, has been recognized worldwide as a key measure to tackle the challenges of climate change and environmental pollution due to green house gas emissions. Electric vehicles (EVs), which are considered by many governments as strategic industry of national importance, have seen rapid development and breakthroughs in battery and vehicle technologies over the past few years. This, coupled with preferential state EV purchasing incentives, likely results in accelerated deployment of EVs over the next few years. However, the mass rollout of EVs will pose a significant challenge to the secure and efficient operation of power systems due to temporal and spatial characteristics of EV charging load. On the other hand, the development of EVs can bring many benefits to power system operations as EVs with vehicle to grid (V2G) technologies could participate in power system balancing and reserve operations, peaking shifting as well as increasing system’s ability to integrate high penetration of renewable power. Therefore, it is important to plan and build the suitable infrastructure, and to manage the integration of EVs to ensure future power systems operate more reliably, more flexibly, and more economically, by coordinating actions of all temporally and spatially distributed actors of different natures, with due considerations to the constraints, and uncertainties imposed upon them by highly complex external environments. 