Impact of electric vehicle infrastructure on the University of Southern California microgrid: Based on smart grid regional demonstration project — Los Angeles

Abstract

With the growing penetration of the electric vehicles to our daily life owing to their economic and environmental benefits, there will be both opportunities and challenges to the utilities when adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) to the distribution network. In this paper, a thorough analysis based on real-world project is conducted to evaluate the impact of electric vehicles infrastructure on the grid relating to system load flow, load factor, and voltage stability. University of Southern California (USC) Distribution microgrid was selected and tested along with different case scenarios utilizing the electrical distribution design (EDD) software to find out the potential impacts to the grid.