Analyzing Distribution Transformers at City Scale and the Impact of EVs and Storage

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EV) are rapidly increasing in popularity, which is signicantly increasing demand on the distribution infrastructure in the electric grid. This poses a serious problem for the grid, as most distribution transformers were installed during the pre-EV era, and thus were not sized to handle large loads from EVs. In parallel, smart grid technologies have emerged that actively regulate demand to prevent overloading the grid's infrastructure, in particular by optimizing the use of grid-scale energy storage. In this paper, we rst analyze the load on distribution transformers across a small city and study the potential impact of EVs as their penetration levels increase. Our real-world dataset includes the energy demand from 1,353 transformers and charging proles from 91 EVs over a 1 year period, and thus provides an accurate snapshot of the grid's current state, and allows us to examine the potential impact of increasing EV penetrations. We then evaluate the benets of using smart grid technologies, such as smart EV charging and energy storage, to mitigate the eects of increasing the EV-based load.

Equitable Network-Aware Decarbonization of Residential Heating at City Scale

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Electrification Futures Study: Scenarios of Power System Evolution and Infrastructure Development for the United States

“…DC fast charging stations, for example, can require more than 50 kilowatts of power per vehicle and up to several megawatts per charging station, which is roughly equivalent to adding the peak load of several thousand homes at a single point on the distribution grid. Prior analysis has identified potential issues with steady-state voltage violations, equipment overloading, and in some cases, power quality and transient voltage stability with deployment of electric vehicle charging stations (Nour et al 2018;Bass and Zimmerman 2013;Marah et al 2016;Mehmedalic, Rasmussen, and Harbo 2013;Wamburu et al 2018). Even the spatial clustering of residential electric vehicle (EV) charging could introduce challenges for distribution systems (Muratori 2018), such as the potential need to upgrade distribute system infrastructure.…”

Impact of electric vehicles charging demand on distribution transformers in an office area and determination of flexibility potential

“…Here, 0 ≤ PF ≤ 1 is the power factor. For the analysis, the average power factor of 0.9 and 0.95 is used for summer and winter, respectively, which represents the average power factor in these seasons [30]. The variable power factor is attributed to the temperature difference between summer and winter which influence the power quality of the transformer.…”

“…The relative peak load of the transformers are studied. As a transformer allows to be overloaded for some time, the overload criterion is 1.25, and the critically overload criterion considered is 1.5, as considered in [30]. The relative peak load (R peak,transf . )…”