D-RES: Provision of distributed grid resilience using EVs during extreme weather events

The D-RES Project is a collaboration project led by Dr Desen Kirli from the University of Edinburgh along with Dr Laiz Souto from University of Bath.  

It is funded by the DAFNI with a focus on resilience which relates to their latest funding from UKRI within their  ‘Building a Secure and Resilient World’ programme and ‘The Challenges and Opportunities in Data Sharing’ from the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology.

In a nutshell, the D-RES project developed weather-informed adaptive strategies for grid management amidst increasing EV penetration and worsened climate risk which pose new challenges to the traditional energy management models and networks. 

As evidenced by Storms “Dudley”, “Eunice” and “Franklin” in February 2022 which left over a million homes without electricity, extreme events are an increasing threat not only to humans but also power grid resilience. If we use data from distributed assets and coordinate them effectively, EVs (in this bid, we focus only on EVs due to time and budget constraints) can provide distributed resilience during such shocks. 

A case study in Orkney with a high renewables and EV penetration was chosen to assess the distributed resilience potential of EVs in terms of different balancing services by testing different coordination strategies of EV charging and discharging (i.e. vehicle-to-grid).