Therese Lundblad, Chalmers University of Technology will defend her PhD thesis “Energy Infrastructure for Road Transport Electrification – Modeling Hydrogen Supply, Electric Vehicle Charging, and Grid Constraints.

Date: 17 April.
Time: 10:00 — 13:00
Location: HA1, Hörsalsvägen 4 and online
Opponent: prof. Patrick Plötz, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI, Germany

Visit for more information: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/551268

Popular science description:

Electrifying road transportation requires more than just electric vehicles; it also requires new infrastructure to supply energy in different forms. This thesis models the infrastructure needed in Sweden for two different approaches to electrification: using hydrogen as a fuel and directly charging battery electric vehicles.

For indirect electrification by hydrogen, several ways of supplying hydrogen to refueling stations were compared. Producing hydrogen directly at the refueling station using electricity from the grid was found to be the cheapest option. This system is more cost-effective than either a system that produces hydrogen onsite in “island-mode” without being connected to the electricity grid or a system where hydrogen is produced at a central facility and transported to the refueling station.

For direct electrification, this thesis investigates how home charging of electric vehicles could affect local electricity grids. Electric vehicle charging was analyzed under electricity spot prices (that reflect the balance between electricity generation and demand in an electricity price area), combined with different network tariff designs (which are the fees households pay the grid owner to use the electricity grid). The results show that the risk of overloading in the local grid increases as the share of electric vehicles increases. However, the impacts vary greatly between different areas and are strongly dependent on how the vehicles are charged.

The modeling in this work shows that network tariff design has a large impact on when and to what extent it is cheapest to charge electric vehicles. Some tariff designs allow electric vehicles the flexibility to follow varying spot prices of electricity, but at the cost of increased loading on the local grid. Other designs limit the loading on the local grid but give vehicles lower flexibility to follow low spot prices. The results thereby reveal a tradeoff between adapting electric vehicle charging to low electricity spot prices and reducing loading on the local grid. A network tariff for the combined peak power of households provides a compromise that reduces the load on the grid, while still allowing for some flexibility.