Effects of Adopting Ultra-Fast Charging Stations in the San Francisco Bay Area

Ultra-Fast Charging (UFC) is a rising technology that can shorten the time of charging an Electric Vehicle (EV) from hours to minutes. However, the power consumption characteristics of UFC bring new challenges to the existing power system, and its pros and cons are yet to be studied. This project aims to set up a framework for studying the different aspects of substituting the normal non-residential EV chargers within the San Francisco Bay Area with Ultra-Fast Charging (UFC) stations. Three objectives were defined for three stakeholders involved in this simulation, namely: the EV user, the station owner, and the grid operator. The results show that, UFCs will significantly contribute to increase of peak load and power consumption during the peak demand period, which is an undesirable outcome from grid operation perspective. Total electricity and operations and maintenance costs for station owner would increase subsequently, while this can be justified by analyzing the value of time (VOT) from an EV-user perspective. Additionally, peak-shaving using battery storage facilities is studied for complementing the applied technology change and mitigating the impacts of higher power consumption on the grid.