What impact will the journey patterns of electric vehicles have on their capability to provide ancillary services?

Electric vehicles are projected to contribute up to 60% of total new car sales in the UK by 2030. This will create extra demand on electricity networks, particularly during peak hours. Effective management of existing electricity storage assets during peak demand times, such as electric vehicle batteries, could enable the delivery of grid support in order to minimise the effect of high demand profiles, thus reducing distribution and transmission network impact. Whilst bulk averaged statistical data sets provide fairly predictable UK journey patterns, small high grain data is more susceptible to unpredictable variations in journey times, range and destination. In looking at these smaller, highly detailed journey patterns there is an obvious potential barrier to electric vehicle battery availability for ancillary services. This paper uses data from a trial of 349 electric vehicles from across the UK to explore journey patterns of the vehicles, focusing on duration and range. Through evaluation of real life electric vehicle data, this paper explores driver behaviour and identifies generic journey patterns for a range of commercial and domestic users. Results show the majority of users require less than half of the available battery capacity within the vehicle. The vehicle use profile for both the commercial and private fleet explored in this paper suggests peak shaving opportunities for electric vehicles is limited. However, the proportion of vehicles in use at any one time indicates opportunities are available for those vehicles not utilised primarily for commuter activities.