Impacts of Electric Mobility on the Electric Grid

Introduction

Some of the major concerns of the European Commission are climate change and energy. In 2009 the EU adopted a complete package (the well-known ‘20-20-20’ targets to be achieved in 2020) focuses in three different but related areas: promoting both renewable energies and energy efficiency, and reducing emissions. These targets are the following (http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/package/documentation_en.htm):

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  Europe has to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at least 20% below 1990 levels.

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  20% of EU energy consumption has to come from renewable resources.

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  20% reduction in primary energy use compared with projected levels has to be achieved by improving energy efficiency.

Following the initial EU lines in this theme, the European Commission presented in 2011 the “Energy Roadmap 2050” (http://www.uhasselt.be/datasim) is to provide an entirely new and highly detailed spatial-temporal micro-simulation methodology for human mobility. This methodology is based on massive amounts of big data from different sources. One of the outputs of this project is an activity-based micro-simulation model (ActBM) for traffic forecasting called Feathers, which has been used to predict spatial and temporal electrical vehicle power demand in the region of Flanders (Knapen, Luk; Kochan, Bruno; Bellemans, Tom; Janssens, Davy & Wets, Geert; 2011).

The main objective of this chapter is to study the impact of the electric vehicles' load integration on the electric grid according to a rate of market penetration and different charging scenarios by using accurate information about the spatial and temporal electric load demand due to the electric mobility.

This analysis will be useful to foresee whether the growing presence of electric vehicles could provoke technical problems in the transmission grid. In a second stage, this analysis will allow to evaluate the capacity of the electric vehicles to promote the integration of renewable energies and the availability of this type of vehicles to offer new services such as vehicle to grid applications (V2G), creating new business models. Note that, in some electricity markets, due to their specific rules, the ancillary services (frequency regulation, voltage control, etc.) have to be provided from specific nodes of the transmission grid (Bessa, Ricardo J. and Matos, Manuel A., (2010)). Hence the importance of carrying out this analysis based on a zonal approach.