Evaluation of Grid Level Impacts of Electric Vehicles

Currently, most countries are looking to reduce their dependency on imported oil. The added advantage of reducing green house gas emissions and other pollutants has been strong reasons for the growing support for Electric Vehicles. As electric vehicles would be using the power grid to charge their batteries, there are prevalent doubts as to whether the existing power grid will be able to support the increase in load. It is of great interest to the electric utilities to evaluate the capability of the existing grid to withstand high electric vehicle penetration. The fact that there will be higher concentration of electric vehicles in affluent neighborhoods is of great concern. In this thesis, the impact of electric vehicle concentration is studied and the effects evaluated. The electric vehicle flow in the system is first modeled and the corresponding behavior is studied. This model is integrated into an agent-based simulation to model the demand curve of residential customers. Finally, the demand curve is used in a loss-of-life calculation of the transformer to evaluate the impact on the grid.