Effects of Adopting Ultra-Fast Charging Stations in the San Francisco Bay Area

TL;DR

This study evaluates the impact of adopting Ultra-Fast Charging stations for EVs in the San Francisco Bay Area, highlighting increased peak loads and costs, and explores mitigation strategies like battery storage.

Contribution

It develops a framework to analyze the effects of replacing standard EV chargers with UFC stations on stakeholders and the power grid in a specific urban area.

Findings

UFC stations increase peak load and power consumption during peak hours.

Costs for station owners rise, but can be justified by user value of time.

Battery storage can mitigate grid impacts of UFC adoption.

Abstract

Ultra-Fast Charging (UFC) is a rising technology that can shorten the time of charging an Electric Vehicle (EV) from hours to minutes. However, the power consumption characteristics of UFC bring new challenges to the existing power system, and its pros and cons are yet to be studied. This project aims to set up a framework for studying the different aspects of substituting the normal non-residential EV chargers within the San Francisco Bay Area with Ultra-Fast Charging (UFC) stations. Three objectives were defined for three stakeholders involved in this simulation, namely: the EV user, the station owner, and the grid operator. The results show that, UFCs will significantly contribute to increase of peak load and power consumption during the peak demand period, which is an undesirable outcome from grid operation perspective. Total electricity and operations and maintenance costs for station owner would increase subsequently, while this can be justified by analyzing the value of time (VOT) from an EV-user perspective. Additionally, peak-shaving using battery storage facilities is studied for complementing the applied technology change and mitigating the impacts of higher power consumption on the grid.