Coordinated planning of European charging infrastructure and energy system for optimal V1G and V2G deployment

TL;DR

This paper models European energy systems to compare the costs and benefits of smart vehicle charging (V1G) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies, revealing V1G's dominant cost savings and V2G's market revenue potential.

Contribution

It explicitly incorporates charging infrastructure and costs into a European energy system model, evaluating the competitive impacts of uncontrolled, V1G, and V2G charging strategies.

Findings

V1G achieves 19-42 billion euros annual savings.

V2G offers up to 2.5 billion euros savings and 6.4 billion euros market revenues.

V2G is most effective in PV-dominated and limited grid expansion scenarios.

Abstract

Vehicle charging infrastructure targets in Europe currently rely on uniform benchmarks and overlook the flexibility that could be provided by future smart charging (V1G) and vehicle to grid operation (V2G). To address this gap, we explicitly represent charging infrastructure and its costs in a cost minimizing European energy system model, allowing uncontrolled charging, V1G, and V2G to compete. We find that V1G captures the majority of system cost savings, amounting to 19 to 42 billion euros per year, or 2.2 to 4.5 percent, and substantially reduces infrastructure requirements. V2G provides more limited system cost savings of up to 2.5 billion euros per year, but generates substantial balancing market revenues of around 6.4 billion euros per year. V2G deployment is most cost effective in photovoltaic dominated systems and in scenarios with limited grid expansion, where combined solar and wind generation is relatively scarce. Charging infrastructure requirements vary across countries, reflecting either utilization maximization or flexibility maximization. This indicates that uniform EU targets risk overestimating infrastructure needs in some regions while constraining the benefits of smart charging in others.