Vehicle-grid integration: a new frontier for electric mobility In India
Electric mobility offers a unique bouquet of opportunities and challenges due to its interface with the power utility sector. While electric vehicle (EV) adoption can potentially result in a substantial increase in revenue for power distribution companies (DISCOMs) from additional electricity sales due to EV charging, the gains may be accompanied by various risks at multiple levels. Unmanaged EV charging will not only potentially increase the peak load in the DISCOM’s service area, which could have a significant impact on the cost of electricity supply, it can hamper smooth power system operations, by causing voltage instability, harmonic distortion, power losses, and degradation of reliability indices. To manage or avoid these impacts on the power system, a suite of EV charging management solutions, collectively referred to as Vehicle-Grid Integration (VGI) can be deployed. The benefits of VGI extend beyond EV charging load as it can provide useful services to the grid. A plethora of new opportunities open up for the power market with the help of VGI such as peak shaving, arbitrage opportunities, frequency regulation, and renewable energy storage. This study aims to present the evolving concept of VGI and its different elements and analyse the feasibility of its implementation in the Indian context. It also provides a roadmap for VGI implementation in India by taking into account the domestic electric vehicle ecosystem.
