Coupling local renewable energy production with electric vehicle charging: a survey of the French case

The share of renewable energy sources (RES)’ production in energy mixes, especially the ones of PV panels and wind farms, has been continuously increasing during the last few years. Similarly, a strong development of battery electric vehicles (EV) is expected within the next years. However, these two new innovations could trigger security issues on electrical grids, in particular local congestions and voltage deviations from the required standards. One way to mitigate these problems could be to combine the charging periods of the EVs with the local RES production. This paper aims at analysing the possibility to implement this kind of smart charging strategy in France by 2020, taking into account the wide diversity of local energy mixes in France and their seasonal dependencies. First, the authors identify four different energy mixes representative of most of the local French mixes, each one related to a region in France. Then, we model the charging load curves of the EVs at the substation level for the same regions. We deduce the “green charging ratio” (GCR) without any charging management strategy. The same ratio is then computed assuming that an Energy Management System (EMS), which goal is to maximize this ratio, controls the EV charging patterns. The results are provided for each region and seasons. They show a wide diversity of green charging ratio achievable: in very windy regions, the GCR without any EMS is already rather high; on the contrary, in sunny regions, the GCR is much improved with the implementation of the EMS. In such regions, the GCR can also be enhanced with the penetration of charging stations at working places.