Electric vehicles and low voltage grid: impact of uncontrolled demand side response

The authors are looking at the impact of electric vehicles (EV) charging from low-voltage (LV) networks. Based on the data obtained from two different pilot projects: (i) Mini-E trial where EV users were incentivised to charge during the night; (ii) My Electric Avenue trial, where there were no similar incentives, authors want to quantify the impact of EV charging, presuming that the number of home-charging EV users will increase significantly in the near future. By assuming that the current load at individual household level is known or inferred, simulations are performed to estimate the future load. The authors look at different percentages of EV uptake and model clustered scenarios, where the social networking effect is imposed – users adopt an EV with a higher probability if their neighbour already has one. Simulations demonstrate that incentivising night-time charging can create large new peaks during the night, which could have negative effects on LV networks. On the other hand, simulations based on the data with no incentives shows that naturally occurring diversity in charging behaviour does not automatically result in comparable network stress at the same penetrations.