There is a continuous and fast increase in electric vehicles (EVs) adoption in many countries due to the reduction of EVs prices, governments’ incentives and subsidies on EVs, the need for energy independence, and environmental issues. It is expected that EVs will dominate the private cars market in the coming years. These EVs charge their batteries from the power grid and may cause severe effects if not managed properly. On the other hand, they can provide many benefits to the power grid and get revenues for EV owners if managed properly. The main contribution of the article is to provide a review of potential negative impacts of EVs charging on electric power systems mainly due to uncontrolled charging and how through controlled charging and discharging those impacts can be reduced and become even positive impacts. The impacts of uncontrolled EVs charging on the increase of peak demand, voltage deviation from the acceptable limits, phase unbalance due to the single-phase chargers, harmonics distortion, overloading of the power system equipment, and increase of power losses are presented. Furthermore, a review of the positive impacts of controlled EVs charging and discharging, and the electrical services that it can provide like frequency regulation, voltage regulation and reactive power compensation, congestion management, and improving power quality are presented. Moreover, a few promising research topics that need more investigation in future research are briefly discussed. Furthermore, the concepts and general background of EVs, EVs market, EV charging technology, the charging methods are presented.

In light of the challenges of integrating more renewable energy sources (RESs) into the utility grid, the virtual synchronous generator (VSG) will become an indispensable configuration of modern power systems. RESs are gradually replacing the conventional synchronous generators that are responsible for supplying the utility grid with the inertia damping properties, thus renewable power grids are more vulnerable to disruption than traditional power grids. Therefore, the VSG is presented to mimic the behavior of a real synchronous generator in the power grid through the virtual rotor concept (i.e., which emulates the properties of inertia and damping) and virtual primary and secondary controls (i.e., which emulate the conventional frequency control loops). However, inadequate imitation of the inertia power owing to the low and short-term power of the energy storage systems (ESSs) may cause system instability and fail dramatically. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a VSG based on superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) technology to emulate the needed inertia power in a short time and thus stabilizing the system frequency at different disturbances. The proposed VSG based on SMES is applied to improve the frequency stability of a real hybrid power grid, Egyptian Power System (EPS), with high renewables penetration levels, nonlinearities, and uncertainties. The performance superiority of the proposed VSG-based SMES is validated by comparing it with the traditional VSG approach based on battery ESSs. The simulation results demonstrated that the proposed VSG based on the SMES system could significantly promote ultra-low-inertia renewable power systems for several contingencies.

The growing popularity of private vehicles' electrification will have a negative impact on the electric power system, especially on the distribution networks, if electric vehicles (EVs) charging is not managed properly. In this paper, a new technique for smart charging of EVs is proposed and tested with simulation. A fuzzy logic controller is used to control and manage the EV charging process to maximize electric utility and EV owner benefits. The electric utility's benefit is to mitigate the EV charging impacts on the distribution network by shifting EV charging to the off-peak period, while EV owners' benefit is to charge the EV at low cost. The controller regulates and controls the EV charging power depending on electricity price signal provided by the electric utility and EV battery state of charge (SoC). This controller needs basic communication with the electric utility to receive the electricity price signal every 1 hour. The objective of the controller is to charge EVs at low cost while keeping the normal operating conditions of the distribution network. MATLAB/SIMULINK is used to perform simulations and test the effectiveness of the proposed smart charging method. The results demonstrated that the proposed smart charging method reduced the impacts of EVs charging on the distribution network compared with uncontrolled charging.

Blockchain technology applications in the electricity sector are getting considerable attention from both academia and industry. It is expected that blockchain will play an important role in the transition to the smart grid. The blockchain applications in the electricity sector can be classified to optimizing existing processes like metering and billing or grid management and using blockchain for emerging applications such as creating new platforms for value exchange like peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. This paper briefly introduces fundamentals of blockchain technology such as different types of blockchain networks and consensus mechanisms, in addition to introducing a few blockchain platforms that are widely used in current studies, projects, and startups or may have future potential in electricity sector applications. The contribution of this paper is to provide a review of potential applications of blockchain in many electricity sector use cases, and they are categorized into eight categories such as P2P energy trading, wholesale markets, retail markets, metering and billing, trading of renewable energy certificates (RECs) and carbon credits, electric mobility, enhancement of power system cyber security, investments in renewable energy sources (RESs), and power system operation and management. Moreover, examples of research studies, pilot projects, industrial projects, startups, or companies investigating the blockchain capabilities at each potential application are introduced. Furthermore, the studies presented at each use case are compared to clarify and highlight the blockchain functions and involved actors. Finally, the paper discusses the challenges that blockchain technology is facing that obstruct large-scale adoption in different sectors and in the electricity sector specifically and potential solutions to these challenges that are being developed.

It is expected that the number of electric vehicles will increase significantly worldwide. Although, this increase represents an environmental advantage. Charging of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) considers a challenge for the electric utilities. In this paper, the charging impact of PEVs on a benchmark low voltage (LV) grid has been studied. The LV network used as a case study is developed by the EU project “Microgrids”. Two charging scenarios have been investigated in this paper, 1) uncontrolled charging, and 2) Indirect controlled charging with Time of Use (TOU) pricing. In each scenario, different penetration levels of PEVs have been studied (e.g., 20 %, 30%, and 50%). The effects of PEVs charging on transformer loading, feeders loading, and voltages at the endpoints of the feeders have been investigated. 24-hour time-series simulations have been used in the study. The results demonstrate that with the use of indirect controlled charging a higher number of PEVs can be charged from the distribution network without infrastructure upgrade and for uncontrolled charging infrastructure upgrade will be needed.

Egypt aims to diversify electricity generation sources and targets 42% of its power capacity through different renewable energy sources (RESs) by 2035. Such an increased share of RESs will make grid operation and control more tedious and may have a negative impact on power system frequency stability. Therefore, this paper is the first study that studies the automatic generation control of future multi-source power systems (e.g., Egyptian Power System (EPS) in a future 2035 scenario) considering high RESs penetrations and electric vehicles (EVs). The RESs in this future scenario include photovoltaic plants, wind generation plants, concentrated solar power plants, and hydropower plants. The EPS also contains other traditional power plants based on fossil fuels (i.e., coal, oil, and natural gas) and nuclear power plants. Moreover, this study investigates the effect of participation of EVs in enhancing the frequency stability of the future-scenario EPS. Furthermore, this study proposes a fractional-order proportional integral derivative (FOPID) controller for load frequency control (LFC), and its parameters are tuned using RUNge Kutta optimizer (RUN), which is a new optimization algorithm. To assess the FOPID controller performance, it was compared with a proportional-integral-derivative controller, proportional-integral controller, and integral controller. The results showed the positive effect of EVs’ participation in frequency regulation of the future-scenario EPS, the effectiveness of RUN optimizer in LFC application, and the superior performance of the FOPID controller over its peers of controllers used in the literature in improving frequency stability through reducing frequency deviations caused by different disturbances and under various power system conditions.