Methodology and assessment of electrification impacts on residential demand characteristics

Electric vehicle (EV) chargers, heat pumps, electric water heaters, and other electric end-use technologies are projected to increase residential end-use demand in many locations, resulting in considerable changes in the demand characteristics. It is critical for distribution planners to understand these changes in residential demand and the associated impacts to the distribution system. This paper introduces a detailed residential end-use modelling framework that allows for the disaggregated characterization of residential end-use loads and their interactions with environmental factors and stochastic customer behaviours. Selected use cases for the modelling framework are introduced to illustrate how the framework can help inform distribution planning and design decisions. The paper also demonstrates the modelling framework for the assessment of different scenarios under various climate conditions and adoption levels of electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, and other electric end-use equipment. Electrification impacts on residential diversified peak demands, annual, seasonal and daily load shapes, as well as the demand diversity at different levels of the distribution system are also discussed.