GridGrowing Numbers of Electric Vehicles Make Grid Planning Urgent
Electric vehicles are coming—en masse. How can local utilities, grid planners and cities prepare? “While we don’t know exactly when the tipping point will happen, fleets of fast-charging vehicles are going to change how cities and utilities manage their electricity infrastructure” said one expert. “It’s not a question of if, but when.”
Electric vehicles are coming—en masse. How can local utilities, grid planners and cities prepare? That’s the key question addressed with a new study led by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office. “While we don’t know exactly when the tipping point will happen, fleets of fast-charging vehicles are going to change how cities and utilities manage their electricity infrastructure” said Michael Kintner-Meyer, an electrical systems engineer in PNNL’s Electricity Infrastructure group and the study’s lead author. “It’s not a question of if, but when.” The study integrates multiple factors not evaluated before, such as electric trucks for delivery and long haul, as well as smart EV charging strategies.
Transportation Electrification Is Coming
According to EV Hub, about 1.5 million EVs, mostly cars and SUVs, are currently on the road in the U.S. PNNL researchers evaluated the capacity of the power grid in the western U.S. over the next decade as growing fleets of EVs of all sizes, including trucks, plug into charging stations at homes and businesses and on transportation routes. For their study, the authors used the best available data about future grid capacity from the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, or WECC. The analysis revealed the maximum EV load the grid could accommodate without building more power plants and transmission lines. The good news is that through 2028, the overall power system, from generation through transmission, looks healthy up to 24 million EVs—about 9 percent of the current light-duty vehicle traffic in the U.S. However, at about 30 million EVs, things get dicey. At the local level, issues may arise at even smaller EV adoption numbers. That’s because one fast-charging EV can draw as much load as up to 50 homes. If, for example, every house in a cul-de-sac has an EV, one power transformer won’t be able to handle multiple EVs charging at the same time.
