UC Irvine

Today's aging electric delivery infrastructure is undergoing an extreme makeover. The current system has inefficiencies, is congested and unable to meet future power reliability, quality, sustainability (e.g., more renewable power) and security needs. The massive effort to modernize the nation's electricity delivery system is collectively known as the "Smart Grid." Transition to a smarter grid will occur over time.

This research addresses one area of electric power system modernization, namely the impacts that high penetrations of distributed energy resources (DER), such as solar and batteries, and plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) could have on the distribution system by (1) evaluating the effect of introducing large amounts of DER and PEV charging on a secondary distribution circuit and (2) developing, applying and evaluating smart grid management scenarios which can reduce consumer electricity costs and flatten residential load profiles.

The improved load profiles presented herein demonstrate that traditional residential load profiles can be purposefully reshaped when rooftop solar, energy storage, and plug-in electric vehicles are introduced into the circuit. Through various battery charging and discharging scenarios and controlled electric vehicle charging, residential loads can be reduced to almost zero, flattened, or behave as a distributed generator. By allowing excess solar generation to flow back onto the grid or dispatching batteries during peak load times, the load profile of an individual home or secondary distribution transformer can be altered in a manner that benefits the distribution grid.