Electric vehicles for improving resilience of distribution systems

In this study, improving the resilience of residential customers through employing Electric Vehicles (EV) is investigated. This solution is especially effective in case of unavailability of distribution systems for a considerable amount of time. An example of this situation is the aftermath of a hurricane when existing grid infrastructure may be fully or partially disabled. In this paper, specific attention is paid to hybrid electric vehicles, as their gasoline can be used as a sufficient source of energy during such conditions. In order to have a fair comparison, selected models of both hybrid and non-hybrid electric vehicles are considered. Moreover, based on available data from reliable literature, this paper has generated different load profiles for various consumption scenarios to model the severity of conditions and estimate the required energy. Moreover, two seasonal conditions are considered and the load profiles are developed based on characteristic curves of major household appliances, instead of their rated powers. Then, the selected electric vehicles are considered as the main power supply and the available serving time of each electric vehicle is computed. Results show that a typical hybrid electric vehicle can supply power to residential units for a reasonable amount of time during a power outage.