On the Integration of Electric Vehicles into German Distribution Grids through Smart Charging (Heider et al. 2024)

Abstract – Efforts to decarbonise the transport sector lead to an increasing share of electric vehicles (EVs), which can significantly stress future distribution grids. The level of stress thereby not only depends on the number of integrated EVs but also the existing topology of the grid and present shares of supply and demand units. We therefore examine the influence of different charging strategies on distinct distribution grid types, namely PV-, wind- and load-dominated grids, and compare the effects on curtailment needs and reinforcement costs. With the help of a quadratic problem formulation, including linearised AC power flow constraints, we deduce optimised charging profiles to minimise the additional stress on the grids. We compare the results to rule-based charging strategies to extract suggestions for the effective integration of EVs. Our analysis shows that the potential of the examined charging strategies to decrease curtailment necessary to solve arising grid issues is limited. However, the additional grid expansion costs caused by EV integration, which mainly occur in the low voltage, can be reduced significantly compared to reference charging, where EV charging is mostly uncontrolled. The optimised charging strategy reduces the total reinforcement costs by 59 %, a reduced charging by 57 % and a residual load based charging by 5 % compared to the reference charging over all investigated grids. Our results also show that the charging strategies prove to be differently useful in the different types of grids. This stresses the importance of considering various grid topologies when investigating the influence of smart charging on distribution grids.

Published in: IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications 

Paper