Review and Classification of PHEV Impacts on Distribution Grids

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) have many appealing features in nowadays energy environment including reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution in urban areas, decreasing reliance on fossil fuels, and potentially providing consumers a lower price substitute for gasoline. Furthermore, they have the potential to be used as a distributed energy storage system for the grid. Despite of aforesaid advantages, the connection of PHEVs to the grid poses a series of new challenges for it. Additional electrical load, from charging these vehicles, has an impact on the electricity system in general and particularly on the distribution grid which is analyzed in terms of power losses, voltage deviations, transformer and cable overloads. Coordinated charging of PHEVs is an achievable solution to these problems. The coordination of the charging gives an improvement of the grid operation with respect to uncoordinated charging. The current study will review and evaluate previous works concerning PHEVs impacts on the distribution grid. Also, this paper classifies impacts in terms of electrical parameters and network equipments specifically power losses and voltage deviations, and network transformers and cables, respectively.

Keywords:

Coordinated Charging , Distribution Grid , Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) , Power Losses , Uncoordinated Charging , Voltage Deviations