Analyzing Electric Vehicle Load Impact on Power Systems: Modeling Analysis and a Case Study for Maldives

Electric vehicles (EVs) can have massive benefits in energy sector especially for a small island country like the Maldives that imports oil with high transportation costs while power could have been generated from abundantly available local renewable resources. However, EV charging may also impose significant investment requirement for the power system that needs to be analyzed carefully including the capacity of the existing distribution network system, investments needed in solar PV together with battery storage and additional diesel capacity to meet the incremental demand from EVs. We explore an EV adoption scenario for Maldives for 2030 with 30% of all vehicles including two-wheelers that dominate the transport on the island under two different charging regimes: uncoordinated and optimized coordinated mode. The latter is achieved through a system wide optimization using a modified version of the World Bank Electricity Planning Model (EPM) that optimizes charging load subject to a range of constraints on allowable timing for different categories of vehicles. If charging from the fleet is uncoordinated, a relatively small increase in energy requirement of 3.1% due to EV may lead to a 26.1% increase in generation capacity requirement and hence 15.7% additional investment. While the optimized charging regime helps to drastically cut down on generation capacity requirements to just 1.8% increase and also considerably eases feeder loading, it may also lead to higher emissions as more EV load during off-peak hours lead to an increase in diesel-based generation. We have therefore explored an additional scenario wherein the annual emissions from the power sector are constrained to the baseline (“No EV”) scenario. The analysis shows the importance of focused modeling analysis to understand the ramifications of EV load impact on the power system including significant increase in generation capacity and potential increase in power sector emissions in a fossil-fuel dominated system.