ZERO CARBON 2030 – “How to Prepare for the EV Revolution”
/ZERO CARBON 2030 – Model
“How to Prepare for the EV Revolution”
Note: If you’d like to listen to this as a podcast, you can choose any of the following links:
· Whether you like it or not, the Electric Vehicle (EV) revolution is coming and is even more likely after the recent UK Government announcement that the sale of new diesel and petrol cars, including hybrids, will be banned from 2035.
This is good news, but it will also create numerous challenges that need to be overcome.
· From an electrical grid perspective this raises all sort of problems – the key one being – “how will the Grid cope with the delivery of all this new power demand?”
· Specifically, if you are looking to install EV charging either at a home, commercial, industrial, town or city-scale – how do you model the implications on your Grid requirements and how can solar & / or energy storage help you to manage the limits within your network?
· Specifically, one of the key problems facing EV installations relates to the imposition of physical electricity import constraints which is the sister issue of that faced by the renewables industry over the past 5 years in the UK (and emerging elsewhere as renewable investment increases)
· Currently, the main issue facing installers of renewables & / or energy storage are export limits. These restrict the power allowed to be exported back to the Grid from any site.
· Given the intermittency of renewable generation, many Distribution Network Operators (DNOs, the businesses managing the local distribution of electricity) have to impose restrictions on the maximum power that can be exported back to the Grid at any time to ensure that voltage levels etc remain within physical limits (voltage, for example, will rise if there is too much generation which can cause most if not all electrical equipment to fail – hence the restrictions.)
· These export limits are either static (same limit all year) or dynamic (via Active Network Management or time of use restrictions.)
· EV’s will start to cause similar physical limits, yet in the other direction. As a result, if you are intending to install EV infrastructure, your physical electrical network will have limits that will either need to be upgraded (at a cost, possibly sizeable) or managed to keep within existing limits.
· This means that If we are going to transition the electrical Grid system to one where there are suddenly millions of vehicles charging at similar times there will either be significant investment costs (to upgrade networks) or significant control / management issues to ensure power is shared appropriately within the physical constraints.
· This means that if you’re going to invest in EVs then you’ll need to be properly assured as to whether you can meet this additional electrical demand & / or what the best combination of alternative energy provision e.g. energy storage & / or renewables, would be to deliver the required load on-site as opposed to from the Grid.
· This is where we (Argand) are really excited as we have now integrated EV analysis into GridMAP (gridmap.argandsolutions.com) to allow clients to analyse the optimum ways to manage these upcoming risks.
· In essence, if you are planning to add EV demand to your network, you have to consider whether your existing connection:
o Will cope with adding you proposed EV charging demand without breaking existing limits?
o Will allow additional EV within your limits by optimising the interaction of energy storage & / or renewables, or
o Will need smarter control to dynamically manage the loads (see https://www.argandsolutions.com/gridgem-control-and-monitoring-for-renewables-and-energy-storage)
· If we are going to crack the 2030 zero carbon target that we (Argand Solutions) believe that very quickly we will need to assess the right investments & strategies to enable this transition
· Key questions you may want to consider:
o What is the optimal energy storage capacity & power combination to deliver EV requirements so that physical limits are not broken
o What is the investment case for this?
o How can solar & / or wind improve this investment?
· With these kind of questions answered then you can approach your management / finance providers with the right information to ensure your critical transport investments are appraised with the right information
· GridMAP has been built for this specific reason and we’d love to help you to analyse your project at any scale
FRASER DURHAM
Commercial Director
fraser@argandsolutions.com