EV's and the Grid
The adoption of EV’s will have a tremendous effect on the electrical grid, however there are technologies available to shed this additional load.
There are at least 113,000 cars that drive on the road daily in my city. If 80% of these cars became fully electrical, and 50% of these cars were charging at once (@7KW), this would amount to a load of 158MW of additional load onto the grid. In comparison, this would be 7% of the load capacity of the McGuire Power station that serves the area. This is a substantial percentage increase, and with the area growing and electrification of all aspects of machinery, the need to curb demand will become a critical problem.
As mentioned in a previous section, load management will be important for the issue of the increasing peak load on our electrical grid. If provisions for load management control was given to utilities, peak loads would be able to be limited during heavy loading times during the day, which typically occurs between 4-7pm. Further intelligent control would be able to provide priority peak charging over certain establishments. For example: commercial properties over residential properties.
If load management is applied to the previous scenario mentioned above, and limited charging to 5.5kW instead of 7kW per Lvl 2 charger, a more than 20% reduction in peak power from this category can be shaved from the grid.
Let's look at charging at the residential level and see how charge management can be applied. If someone comes home from work at the end of the day at 6:00 (without charging the vehicle during the day) and plugs into the home. Concurrently, the HVAC and electric cooking appliances are started. This person is placing additional load at an already peak time. The load profile will look as such:
