Distributed Energy Resources and Electric Vehicle Adoption: A Distribution Planning Strategy and Road Map

This article discusses an integrated distribution planning (IDP) strategy and roadmap developed by Dominion Energy Virginia to address the needs driven by the integration of distributed energy resources (DER), and significant load growth due to the adoption of electric vehicles (EV) and data centers. The first part of the article discusses the IDP framework, and the second part focuses specifically on its expansion and application to help the company to prepare its distribution system for EV adoption. Key objectives of the IDP roadmap are considering DER and EV adoption as an intrinsic component of distribution planning and, moving away from snapshot analyses of key assets (e.g., annual peak demands of substation transformers and feeder mains) and into time-series spatial analysis at feeder section and service transformer level (high resolution/granularity spatiotemporal analysis).