Fast charging of electric buses in distribution systems

The electrification of the public transportation system will likely lead to an increased need of reinforcement in the electrical distribution system. This paper presents an investigation on the impacts of fast charging stations for electric buses on the distribution system. The use the fast charging stations for reactive power compensation (RPC) is presented and the possible benefits for the distribution system is evaluated. The results have shown that by utilizing the charger for RPC, the hosting capacity for electric buses of the distribution system could be increased by up to 13% while network losses could be reduced by approximately 1–2%. However, utilizing the charger for RPC would increase the losses within the converter which could be higher than the gain in network losses. Furthermore the possible benefit depends, to a large extent, on the location of the charge station and the strength of the distribution system.