The Impact of Transitioning to Shared Electric Vehicles on Grid Congestion and Management

The transition towards a sharing economy and the increasing electrification of the transport sector are occurring simultaneously. Consequently, we can expect more car sharing schemes using electric vehicles (EVs) to emerge in coming years. Numerous studies looked into the grid impact of EV charging and its potential to provide ancillary services, but these studies only considered regular EVs. This study compares the charging patterns of regular and shared EVs and creates insight in the grid impact and potential to provide ancillary services with future adoption of shared EVs. Four scenarios for the adoption of shared EVs are proposed, and a method to generate a set of future charging transactions based on historical charging data is presented. The analysis is performed using charging data from an EV sharing company in the Netherlands. Results indicate that charging demand peaks and grid congestion levels decrease substantially with higher adoption of shared EVs. Adoption of shared EVs increases the potential of EVs to provide ancillary services, due to a higher charging flexibility of shared EVs.