Integration of Electric Vehicle Evacuation in Power System Resilience Assessment

Electric vehicle growth is creating a larger share of mobile load in power systems. This can affect system stress in potentially constrained areas of the grid, during a period that may already be an emergency. This paper proposes a novel model to reflect the behavior and spatiotemporal charging demand of electric vehicles during a natural disaster evacuation. The paper integrates the model in an algorithmic approach enabling operators to anticipate grid impacts from the charging of electric vehicles during a wildfire and subsequent evacuation. Geospatial visualization of evacuation charging demand provides a means to enhance operator awareness of spatiotemporal impacts and indicate critical areas of the grid for proactive mitigation. Results for a case study using the RTS-GMLC test system suggest that electric vehicle evacuation can result in dynamic changes to load patterns, adding stress to network components with the most significant load changes occurring during the initial evacuation period.