Using electric vehicles as flexible resource in power systems: A case study in the Netherlands

The European Union (EU) is actively encouraging member countries to phase out traditional oil-fuelled cars in cities in favour of Electric Vehicles (EV) as a solution for increasing efficiency, contributing to ensure security of supply, decrease CO2 emission and decrease local (especially urban) air pollution coming from the transport sector. With the increasing associated charging infrastructure deployment all over European countries, the demand coming from these technologies might impact the power system and potentially offer a source of flexibility through variable charging profiles and battery storage capacity options.
In the recent years, the Dutch government has adopted several policy support mechanisms for EVs uptake, which made the Netherlands the country with the highest market share of electric cars in 2015 in the EU, and the second-highest share worldwide after Norway. This country is therefore a unique case study for the analysis of EVs charging demand and impact of the power sector.
The recent uptake of EVs provides a significant amount of historical data regarding charging profiles, connection times or utilisation patterns pertaining this technology. This paper aims at exploiting such data to evaluate the current and future impact of electric vehicle deployment on the power system.
To that end, historical data from 2015 are used in conjunction with the Dispa-SET model, a unit commitment and power dispatch model developed at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. This aims at investigating the impact of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) charging demand on the current Dutch power system, under different hypotheses for BEV technology penetration and renewable energy deployment (i.e. wind and solar) in the country. In addition, looking at the entire connection periods when vehicles are plugged to the grid, the battery capacity connected to the system is estimated, based on commercial BEV battery characteristics. This total capacity is finally used as variable storage unit in the model, in order to investigate the impact that Vehicle to Grid (V2G) strategies could have on the optimal use of power resources available, with particular attention to Variable Renewable Energy (VRE).