Impact of Electric Vehicles on power quality in a Smart Grid context

Abstract

The large dependency of the imported fossil fuels and the soaring oil prices, makes essential the look for alternatives to the traditional people transportation system. The natural bet is the electric mobility, namely Electric Vehicles (EV), and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV). This way, in this paper is analyzed the potential impacts of the battery charging systems on the grid power quality, in a Smart Grid context. It is considered the current consumed, according to a typical electric consumption profile, and the voltage degradation for a large number of houses. Two different types of EV batteries chargers were considered: a traditional charger; and a smart charger with sinusoidal current consumption and unitary power factor. It presents simulation results of the integration of EVs and PHEVs in terms of power quality, and experimental results of a smart charger which was specially developed for EV charging and that allows mitigation of the power quality degradation.

Accessing flexibility of electric vehicles for smart grid integration

“…The simplest and cheapest circuit arrangements cause system perturbations which have a non-negligible effect on the network, especially in the power classes of EVs. Particularly when in the expected future EVs have reached a large-scale and dense distribution in the distribution grid, missing countermeasures would result in severe loss of quality [13]. But this is not a typical EV problem, the same applies to all simple rectifiers and inverted rectifiers that are connected to the grid.…”

Power quality of actual grids with plug-in electric vehicles in presence of renewables and micro-grids

“…Harmonic distortion in current PEVs has been radically reduced as modern power rectifiers have a unitary power factor while charging the PEV, the Nissan Leaf is an example of this [31]. Previous investigations used different methods to evaluate how PEVs affect transformers, but all of them conclude that uncontrolled charging can overload them and severely reduce the their life.…”

A review of the harmonic and unbalance effects in electrical distribution networks due to EV charging

“…Measurements of THDv have also been presented for a test site on a real network, indicating THDv over 2% also without the EV charging. More suggestions for a worst-case simulation have been presented in [32] for a larger network, where also the network is observed not as a lumped model but the effects of cables have been included. THDv is also dependent on the harmonic voltage drop on the cables, due to harmonic current present in the cable.…”