Leveraging Charging Strategies to Reduce Grid Impacts of Electric Vehicles

Controlled charging can improve the reliability of the electricity grid and provide economic benefits, such as deferring or reducing costly upgrades to grid infrastructure, increasing profits for charging station operators, and reducing charging costs for EV users. [...] Yet the behavioral aspects of EV charging have received little attention compared to technical solutions, which means that some of the flexibility potential of EV charging, and particularly the spatial flexibility, is at risk of remaining untapped. [...] Heterogeneous EV user behaviors can reduce peak demand and their interplay with automated control strategies needs to be considered, as their combination influences the charging demand and its flexibility.7 While the plug-in behavior depends on the EV user’s decision when and where to connect to a charging station and refers to the temporal and spatial distribution of the charging demand, automate. [...] The specific grid context needs to be considered as it determines optimal combinations of behaviors and automated processes.10 For instance, in areas with high evening peaks, flattening the charging demand within a charging session can be more effective for reducing peaks than not charging during peak hours as the charging demand is more evenly spread across time and space. [...] Furthermore, the peak charging demand of an average EV is higher in rural areas compared to urban and suburban areas as driving distances, and hence, charging demand, are typically higher in rural areas.11 At the same time, changes in plug-in behaviors show more potential to reduce peak demand in rural areas, particularly because the charging demand can be distributed across different areas, given.