Power outages and bidirectional electric vehicle charging: Simulation of improved household energy resilience in subarctic conditions

Abstract

In the highly digitalized and electrified modern world, blackouts and power outages cause significant disruptions to societies and to the normal daily life of individuals. The ongoing energy transition, climate change and energy crisis complicate grid dynamics, generate new forms of instability, and weaken the resilience of the electricity transmission grid leading to possible increases in power outages. Electric vehicles (EVs) with bidirectional charging points offer a convenient possibility for households to maintain electricity use during power outages through vehicle-to-home (V2H) operation. This study introduces a novel hybrid model that combines linear programming and deterministic approaches, considering ambient temperatures, to evaluate the efficacy of V2H for power outage prevention in subarctic detached households. The methodology includes a power outage response model that dynamically adjusts the EV’s SOC based on 5-minute interval household demand during sampled outage events. Utilizing real data, we simulate the energy resilience of V2H-equipped households during power outages, focusing on how this capability influences main customer objectives such as outage avoidance, electricity cost reduction, and EV state-of-charge (SOC). The approach provides insights into the system's performance across distinct EV-utilization cases and alternative customer preference assumptions. Based on our results, an EV could be used to fully prevent up to 98 % of all outages of the year occurring during EV plug-in. The average increased electricity costs resulting from outage response are less than 0.2€ if all outage types are considered. Overall, it can be stated that EVs can be effectively used to sustain household loads during power outages with V2H given EV availability, high SOC-level when the outage begins and if the EV is not needed for its primary purpose, mobility, during the outage.