Integration of Mass Amounts of Electric Vehicles Into Electrical Power Systems

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) are widely considered as future of transportation. As most of the greenhouse emissions today come from gas-fueled vehicles, electrifying transportation is one of the most promising solutions for combating the wide-spread pollution of modern cities. However, integration of mass amounts of EVs, with their accompanying charging infrastructure, may cause serious issues to electrical power systems. As emerging super chargers for EVs consume huge amounts of electrical power (in a range of 300-400 kilowatts), their stochastic integration in large amounts would cause voltage violations, feeder overloads, harmonic distortions, etc., causing destabilization of power systems which would consequently cause blocking the further rollout of EVs. This paper summarizes the main challenges that integration of large amounts of EVs causes to electric power systems, and offers this author’s viewpoint on how to overcome these challenges and enable safe electrification of a transportation sector.