What challenges will the construction of large-scale charging piles face?

According to sales data from the Passenger Car Association, China's new energy passenger vehicle sales reached 576,000 units in 2017, which is equivalent to the combined sales of the second to tenth largest electric vehicle sales countries in the world. It has maintained a growth rate of 68%. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers predicts that sales of new energy vehicles will exceed 1 million units in 2018.

Sales of new energy vehicles in China are increasing year by year at a relatively high rate. As we all know, the development of electric vehicles is inseparable from the progress of infrastructure. One of the biggest pain points of electric vehicles is the issue of cruising range. Problems such as insufficient cruising range and inconvenient charging have always been a major worry for consumers. Our government is also actively planning the construction of charging piles to solve these problems.

On July 11, the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance released data: As of June 2018, member units within the alliance had reported a total of 272,000 public charging piles, including 120,000 AC charging piles, 88,000 DC charging piles, and 64,000 AC and DC integrated charging piles. In June 2018, there were 5,520 new public charging piles compared with May 2018. From July 2017 to June 2018, an average of about 8,345 new public charging piles were added every month, with a year-on-year increase of 58.4% in June 2018.

In addition, the National Energy Administration's "2018 Energy Work Guidance" states that 600,000 charging piles are planned to be built in 2018, including 100,000 public charging piles and 500,000 private charging piles.

It can be seen that the national and local governments are increasing investment in the construction of charging piles. Recently, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the State Grid Energy Research Institute jointly released the "Analysis of the Impact and Benefit of Electric Vehicle Development on Distribution Networks". The report shows that China has become the world's largest charging pile market, and the operation of large-scale charging infrastructure has brought new challenges to the development of the overall power grid, distribution network, and power supply services.

Overall power grid: peak load increases

For the power consumption behavior of special facilities, the peak and valley differences are more obvious. Especially for electric vehicle charging behavior, the peak charging load in the evening will be greatly increased. The report shows that by 2020 and 2030, under the disordered charging situation, the peak load in the State Grid Corporation's operating area will increase by 13.61 million kilowatts and 153 million kilowatts, which is expected to be equivalent to 1.6% and 13.1% of the regional peak load in that year.

Distribution network: increasing demand for capacity expansion and transformation, increasing difficulty in safety management

The impact on the distribution network is mainly concentrated in two parts. Part of this is the increase in user demand for distribution network capacity expansion and transformation. As the number of electric vehicles increases in some areas, charging demand also increases, which will lead to an increase in the construction and development of charging facilities in some areas.

On the other hand, the increase in electric vehicles has also increased the demand for high-current power supply stability, and some unreasonable wiring may also increase the risk of tripping of the distribution network protection actions at all levels, bringing greater power safety hazards, which also poses a greater challenge to the safety management of the distribution network.

Power supply services: improved service quality and efficiency requirements

Charging piles in residential areas are generally a small-capacity "piecemeal installation" model for a single user. Compared with the "overall installation" model, the workload, service efficiency and service quality have higher requirements.

In addition, due to the early stage of development, public power distribution capacity is still relatively sufficient. However, with the gradual increase of electric vehicles in the future, the capacity will not be able to meet the installation needs of users, thus causing user dissatisfaction.

In addition, the report also shows that in the future, there may be a large number of high-voltage self-managed households "transferring power supply" or the problem of managing multiple power users at the same site will increase the complexity of marketing services.

The report mainly categorizes the impact of electric vehicle charging on the power grid into the popularity of electric vehicles, types of electric vehicles, charging time of electric vehicles, charging methods of electric vehicles and charging characteristics of electric vehicles. Various impacts are ultimately reflected in the challenges that charging infrastructure poses to the overall distribution capacity and service efficiency of the power grid.