Electric Vehicle integration in Zero-Carbon Buildings: Analyzing the impact on carbon emissions and economic performance

Abstract

The widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) offers a promising solution to mitigate the supply–demand energy mismatch in buildings. However, existing studies have focused on the economic benefits of integrating EVs into buildings, with limited guidance on their application in promoting zero-carbon building development. To fill this gap, this study proposes a dual-layer optimization approach combining day-ahead EV scheduling and V2B bidirectional charger configuration, targeting both economic and carbon emissions objectives. This approach was applied to a typical zero-carbon building in Beijing, China, and a multi-time-scale analysis was conducted to explore the changes in economic cost and carbon emissions with varying configuration of EV chargers. Results show that optimizing for economic benefits can reduce costs by up to 25.38%, but at the cost of a 17.03% increase in carbon emissions. Conversely, prioritizing carbon emissions leads to a reduction of up to 12.47%, but with more modest economic savings of 12.08%. These findings highlight the importance of balancing carbon emissions reduction with cost efficiency when defining optimization objectives. Strict carbon reduction targets require constraints on EV charging behaviors, potentially compromising economic benefits. Furthermore, the study reveals that, under current electricity prices and battery costs, effective peak-valley arbitrage using EVs remains challenging.