Impact of Dynamic Electricity Tariff and Home PV System Incentives on Electric Vehicle Charging Behavior: Study on Potential Grid Implications and Economic Effects for Households

Abstract

The rapid increase of electric vehicles (EVs) would lead to a rise in load demand on power grids but create different potential benefits as well. Those benefits comprise EVs serving as a mobile energy storage system to participate in adjusting the load on the power grids and helping manage renewable energy resources. This paper evaluates the effect of dynamic electricity prices and home photovoltaic (PV) system incentives on users’ EVs charging behavior and potential impacts on grid load and household economy. This has been done by establishing and assessing three different optimized charging configurations and comparing them to an uncontrolled charging strategy. In this study, the charging incentives are applied to a representative sample of 100 households with EVs and PV systems in a metropolitan area. The results show that an optimized charging strategy based on the dynamic electricity tariff can reduce charging costs by 18.5%, while a PV-based optimized strategy can reduce the costs by 33.7%. Moreover, the PV-integrated optimization strategies significantly increase the utilization of PV energy by almost 46% on average, compared to uncontrolled charging. In addition, the simulations of this research have depicted the capability of using home PV systems’ incentives to smoothen the charging profiles and hence significantly reduce the maximum grid load. However, the electricity price optimization strategy increases the aggregated charging peaks, which can only be slightly reduced by peak shaving. Therefore, an identical price signal for all households might be critical. Further analyses have shown that direct charging occurs simultaneously with household electricity assigned to a specific low-voltage grid while PV and price incentive charging configurations shift the charging peaks away from household load peaks.