Mitigating the Impact of an Official PEV Charger Deployment Plan on an Urban Grid

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are rapidly increasing all over the world as electromobility is being promoted to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. PEVs locally produce zero emissions and they are more efficient in contrast to internal combustion engine vehicles. On the other hand, the impact of the uncoordinated charging of PEVs is expected to create new challenges for the established distribution grid. This article initially evaluates the impact of uncoordinated charging on the voltage regulation and transformer loading in the city of Heraklion, Greece. Then, a coordinated charging strategy is proposed to deal with the issue of transformer capacity violation by PEVs. Two cases were considered when the transformer overloading from PEV charging was taken into consideration: (a) keeping the transformer below its nominal capacity limit and (b) keeping the transformer below 90% of its nominal capacity limit. This was achieved by distributing the available capacity (nominal capacity minus the residential loads) of the transformer to the PEV chargers in a way that the aforementioned limits were satisfied. Real-world data of the distribution grid and the hourly power consumption of the city were used to validate the proposed method. Results show that possible transformer capacity violation can be tackled by the proposed coordinated charging, without exceeding the voltage regulation limits.