Sustainability, Resiliency, and Grid Stability of the Coupled Electricity and Transportation Infrastructures: Case for an Integrated Analysis

Electrified vehicles (EVs) couple transportation and electrical infrastructures, impacting vehicle sustainability, transportation resiliency, and electrical grid stability. These impacts occur across timescales; grid stability at the millisecond scale, resiliency at the daily scale, and sustainability over years and decades. Integrated models of these systems must share data to explore timescale dependencies, and reveal unanticipated outcomes. This paper examines EV adoption for sustainability, resiliency, and stability effects. Sustainability findings, consistent with previous studies, indicate that electrification generally reduces lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and increases SOx and NOx. Electrified vehicles enhance vehicle resiliency (ability of vehicle to complete typical trips during fuel outage). Coupled results enhance EV resilience research, finding that a 16-km (10-mi) all-electric range plug-in hybrid EV improves resiliency ∼50% versus a gasoline-only vehicle. Increasing EV market share reduces grid stability. Stability depends upon charging profiles and background electrical demand. Stability-related grid outages increase with EV market penetration. This paper modeled these systems in their coupled form across timescales yielding results not obvious if the systems were modeled in isolation. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)IS.1943-555X.0000251.© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers. Author keywords: Sustainability; Resiliency; Electrical grid; Electrical grid stability; Transportation; Electric vehicles; Lifecycle assessment.