Synergy between Residential Electric Vehicle Charging and Photovoltaic Power Generation through Smart Charging Schemes : Models for Self-Consumption and Hosting Capacity Assessments

The world is now in a transition towards a more sustainable future. Actions to reduce the green-house gases (GHG) emissions have been promoted and implemented globally, including switching to electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy technologies, such as solar photovoltaics (PV). This has led to a massive increase of EVs and PV adoption worldwide in the recent decade. However, large integration of EVs and PV in buildings and electricity distribution systems pose new challenges such as increased peak loads, power mismatch, component overloading, and voltage violations, etc. Improved synergy between EVs, PV and other building electricity load can overcome these challenges. Coordinated charging of EVs, or so-called EV smart charging, is believed to a promising solution to improve the synergy. This licentiate thesis investigates the synergy between residential EV charging and PV generation with the application of EV smart charging schemes. The investigation in this thesis was carried out on the individual building, community and distribution grid levels. Smart charging models with an objective to reduce the net-load (load - generation) variability in residential buildings were developed and simulated. Reducing the net-load variability implies both reducing the peak loads and increasing the self-consumption of local generation, which will also lead to improved power grid performance. Combined PV-EV grid hosting capacity was also assessed. Results show that smart charging schemes could improve the PV self-consumption and reduce the peak loads in buildings with EVs and PV systems. The PV self-consumption could be increased up to 8.7% and the peak load could be reduced down to 50%. The limited improvement on self-consumption was due to low EV availability at homes during midday when the solar power peaks. Results also show that EV smart charging could improve the grid performance such as reduce the grid losses and voltage violation occurrences. The smart charging schemes improve the grid hosting capacity for EVs significantly and for PV slightly. It can also be concluded that there was a slight positive correlation between PV and EV hosting capacity in the case of residential electricity distribution grids