EV Penetration for Minimizing Power System Emissions

This work illustrates the potential of Electric Vehicles (EVs) as a grid support tool that will lower carbon emissions from both the energy production sector and the transportation sector. EVs can provide peak shaving power to the grid while discharging and valley filling power while charging to flatten the total load curve of a distribution system. The idea is called Vehicle to Grid (V2G). Flattening the load curve will allow utility providers to delay upgrading, or the purchase of new power generation stations, as well as best utilize renewable energy resources that may be uncontrollable in nature. Electrical energy production and transportation combined accounted for 2,534 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the US in 2019. Utilizing EVs for transportation as well as grid support will decrease this figure in each sector. This technology may pave the way to cleaner, more reliable, cost effective energy systems. To achieve the goal of illustrating the potential of EVs benefits to a power system, a model will be created using MATLAB and several case studies will be presented. A well-known distribution system model will be utilized and several of the most popular EVs parameters are chosen for testing. Because of the stochastic nature of EVs, a probabilistic approach will be applied to multiple simulation parameters to ensure the most realistic result is found.