Charging electric vehicles at strategic times during midday and the wee hours of the morning can take the pressure off the power grid in the electrification of transportation, new research finds.
As electric vehicles grow in popularity, there is concern that demand for charging will correspond with peak hours of electricity usage, requiring significant capacity expansion to meet peak demand, especially during the warm summer months. But by incentivizing charging during the day at workplaces and overnight via scheduled charging, this extra peak demand can be avoided, according to a new model published in the journal Physical Science.
“It could be done with low-cost technology available today,” says Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Trancik and her colleagues examined the impact of electrical vehicles on the grid in New York, NY and Dallas, TX, two very different cities with very different commuting patterns. They took into account the actual energy consumption of car trips at varying speeds and in various road conditions using both survey data and data from GPS trackers that measure velocity on a second-by-second basis. They also tracked historical energy production and demand, including how weather conditions can alter that demand from day to day and hour by hour throughout the...
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