Mitigation of the Impact of High Plug-in Electric Vehicle Penetration on Residential Distribution Grid Using Smart Charging Strategies

Vehicle electrification presents a great opportunity to reduce transportation greenhouse gas emissions. The greater use of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), however, puts stress on local distribution networks. This paper presents an optimal PEV charging control method integrated with utility demand response (DR) signals to mitigate the impact of PEV charging to several aspects of a grid, including load surge, distribution accumulative voltage deviation, and transformer aging. To build a realistic PEV charging load model, the results of National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) have been analyzed and a stochastic PEV charging model has been defined based on survey results. The residential distribution grid contains 120 houses and is modeled in GridLAB-D. Co-simulation is performed using Matlab and GridLAB-D to enable the optimal control algorithm in Matlab to control PEV charging loads in the residential grid modeled in GridLAB-D. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimal charging control method in mitigating the negative impacts of PEV charging on the residential grid.