Interaction of consumers, photovoltaic systems and electric vehicle energy demand in a Reference Network Model

The electrification of the transport sector is one of the most promising solutions to mitigate the dependency from fossil fuels. At the distribution level, an uncoordinated management of electric vehicles (EVs) added to the high shares of intermittent RES could hinder security of supply and hide related economic benefits. To cope with these challenges, smart charging strategies and Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) services are required. The aim of this paper is to identify successful EVs charging/discharging strategies to balance residential PV electricity production in a representative distribution network context. The results illustrate that well-defined schemes can lead to several grid benefits: better control over supply-demand imbalances, contained impact on voltage spread, reduction of high peak and extreme ramp-up. These results refer to the technical side, and may be used in combination with energy price information to provide new hints on how to design effective electric vehicles' tariffs.