EV Overnight Charging Strategy in Residential Sector: Case of Winter Season in Quebec

Abstract

Electric Vehicle (EV) technologies offer a leading-edge solution for clean transportation and have evolved substantially in recent years. The growing market and policies of governments predict EV massive penetration shortly; however, their large deployment faces some resistances such as the high prices compared to Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars, the required infrastructure, the liability for novelty and standardisation. During winter periods of cold countries, since the use of heating systems increases, the peak power may produce stress to the grid. This fact, combined with EVs high penetration, during charging periods inside of high consumption hours might overload the network, becoming a threat to its stability. This article presents a framework to evaluate load shifting strategies to reschedule the EV charging to lower grid load periods. The undesirable “rebound” effect of load shifting strategies is confirmed, leading us to our EV local overnight charging strategy (EV-ONCS). Our strategy combines the forecast of residential demand using probabilistic distribution from historical consumption, prediction of the EV expected availability to charge and the charging strategy itself. EV-ONCS avoids demand rebound of classic methods and allows a peak-to-average ratio reduction demonstrating the relief for the grid with very low implementation cost.