SAI: Integration of Electric Vehicles and the Electric Grid

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

This project explores how people can benefit from improving the flow of energy and information between electric vehicles (EVs) and the electric grid. Many Americans are experiencing frequent power outages and rising energy costs. EVs offer a promising solution as they can serve as backup power sources during outages, charge at cheaper times, support the grid, and promote the integration of renewable energy.

However, to fully harness the advantages of EVs, encouraging EV charging practices that prioritize grid stability and economic incentives is vital. This SAI research project combines economic, behavioral, and technical concepts to develop a Vehicle-Grid Integration (VGI) system that maximizes the advantages of EVs in addressing power outages, reducing energy costs, and creating a strong and sustainable energy system.

This project explores the potential benefits of VGI, the costs and challenges associated with its implementation, and how best to share the benefits among people. Additionally, this project examines how people most prefer to participate and be compensated for using their buildings and EVs as resources to make the electric grid more resilient.

Building on existing collaborations with policymakers, industry, and nonprofits, this SAI project is organized into four research thrusts. Thrust 1 focuses on finding pricing mechanisms and institutional arrangements that promote user-friendly VGI services. Thrust 2 performs power flow studies to ensure the power grid can handle VGI and designs a system for optimizing EV charging and discharging schedules.

Thrust 3 examines socio-economic disparities in benefiting from VGI and explores consumer willingness to participate in bidirectional EV charging. Thrust 4 develops a machine learning model and a synthetic dataset that includes data on how consumers adopt and use VGI services, as well as the impact of these adoption and usage patterns. By combining data from laboratory experiments, surveys, interviews, and real-world implementations of VGI infrastructure, this project offers a model for predicting the effects and patterns of widespread adoption of VGI systems across the country.

This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.