Achieving reliable coordination of residential plug-in electric vehicle charging: A pilot study

We report findings from a real-world pilot study exploring a novel pricing and control mechanism to coordinate residential EV charging loads. The proposed pricing mechanism presents EV owners with a “menu of deadlines” that offers lower electricity prices the longer they are willing to delay their charging completion times. Given customers’ reported charging preferences, a smart charging system dynamically optimizes the power drawn by EVs in real-time to minimize their collective strain on the grid while ensuring all EVs are charged by their user-requested deadlines. We find that customers allow their charging to be delayed by over eight hours on average. Using this flexibility, the smart charging system reliably eliminates demand spikes by reshaping EV loads to flatten the aggregate load curve. Importantly, customer participation rates remained stable throughout the study, providing evidence that the proposed mechanism is a viable “non-wires alternative” to meet the growing demand for electricity from EVs.