Episodic air quality impacts of plug-in electric vehicles

A spatially and temporally resolved model of the electricity grid – Economic vs environmental dispatch

“…Very few studies are spatially resolved and amenable to air quality analyses [5,44,51]. However, most of these do not include a sophisticated dispatch model and use a relatively simple dispatch strategy, such as marginal dispatch [56,57], or average grid mix [58,59] with simplified system constraints [60].…”

“…Concerning the applications assessed in previous work, some dispatch models were developed to assess the impacts of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) on air quality [5], emissions [44,45], and distribution system [46]. Others assessed integration of intermittent resources [47] such as wind [48] or solar [49], addition of demand response [50], water consumption [51] and climate impacts of the grid [52].…”

“…The fact that integration of intermittent resources and plug-in vehicles might require more peaking units is also taken into account when determining a combination of load-following and peaking units for the suite of new generating units (strategy described in [5,49] is used to determine PEV demand). Three and a half GW of combined cycles and one GW of simple cycle gas turbine power plants were determined to be required by the final results of the algorithm to meet all demand.…”

“…NO x, and other criteria pollutant emissions from the dispatch model, are then used as inputs to the UCI-CIT model [5,65,66] to obtain air quality results.…”

“…It is spatially resolved in order to include the amount of electricity that each specific generator produces. Resolving the spatial and temporal electricity generation also allows the amount of pollutants emitted from each generator to be established as a function of space and time, thereby providing the opportunity to study air quality impacts associated with various market and generator dispatch strategies [5].…”