[email protected] IMPACT OF FULLY ELECTRIC VEHICLE BATTERY CHARGING LOADS ON THE LOAD DEMAND OF DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS

Fully Electric Vehicles (FEVs) hold the promise, if widely adopted, of drastically reducing carbon emissions from surface transport and could, therefore, form a major thrust in the global efforts to meet the emissions reduction targets. In the UK, the effect of widespread adoption of FEVs would be manageable on the electricity grid at the 132kV level, but the same is not true for the local distribution network. The increased loading, particularly in residential areas where FEVs are more likely to be connected to, could require replacement of cables or establishment of local ‘smart grids’ to manage loading on a street-by-street basis to optimise load and generation scheduling. This paper focuses on quantifying the impact of FEV battery charging loads on the load demand in distribution systems. The paper aims to develop a methodology to determine the load profile at distribution level when the FEV battery charging load is given consideration. This includes the time of the peak load, the size of the peak load and the shape of the load curve. The methodology takes into account the stochastic nature of the start time of individual battery charging and the initial battery state-of-charge. Results show that a 10% market penetration of FEVs in the studied system would result in an increase in daily peak demand by up to 20.2%, while a 20% level of EV penetration would lead to a 38.4% increase in peak load, for the scenario of uncontrolled domestic charging – the ‘worst case’ scenario.