Investigating the Impacts of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles on Power Distribution Systems

Despite the economic and environmental advantages of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), the increased utilization of PHEVs brings up new concerns for power distribution system decision makers. Impacts of PHEVs on distribution networks, although have been proven to be noticeable, have not been thoroughly investigated for future years. In this paper, a comprehensive model is proposed to study the PHEV impacts on residential distribution systems. In so doing, PHEV fundamental characteristics, i.e., PHEV battery capacity, PHEV state of charge (SOC), and PHEV energy consumption in daily trips, are accurately modeled. As some of these effective characteristics depend on vehicle owner´s behavior, their behavior and interests are considered in the proposed model. Also, to get a more practical model of PHEVs, the number of vehicles in a residential distribution network, the PHEV penetration level for upcoming years, distribution of PHEVs in the network, and estimation of household load growth for upcoming years are extracted from related published reports. The proposed model is applied to the IEEE 34-node test feeder, and PHEV impacts on residential distribution network are studied in different time horizons. A sensitivity analysis is also performed to demonstrate the effects of PHEV operation modes on the network load profile.