A Unified Power System Model to Analyze the Benefits of Electric Vehicles in Power Grid

Electric vehicles (EVs) can serve as generators, supplying power during blackouts to mitigate potential damage and losses. However, current power system models prevent a comprehensive analysis of EVs' role in power grid operations since EVs are located at the residential level, and large-scale power system studies use separate models for generation, transmission, and distribution. To analyze how EVs can improve the power grid operations under contingencies, it is necessary to construct the power grid model considering three aspects. This paper presents an undergraduate senior design study that introduces an end-to-end model of the electric grid that includes generation, transmission, distribution and customer. Based on the proposed model, the authors build a synthetic grid for Bryan/College Station (BCS) area to analyze the benefits of EVs in power grids. The proposed model not only presents a more complete model of EVs and distributed generation but also provides different scenarios for EVs' benefits studies.