Identifications of bottlenecks and intelligent solutions for boosting the ZEV penetration in smart buildings

The rapid expansion of electric vehicles (EVs) necessitates integrating substantial charging infrastructure into buildings. While previous studies assessed the impact of charging demand on utility grids and explored mitigation strategies through renewable energy (REe) and energy storage systems (ESS), they overlooked limited grid capacities and their impact on building energy systems and the design of REe and ESS. This research fills these gaps by examining the impacts of additional charging ports on building energy systems under limitations. Results indicate that while limitations mitigate negative grid and environmental impacts, they also lead to economic losses. Subsequently, to counter this, a hybrid REe system is optimized under limitations, reducing exceeded energy to below 149.86 kWh/m² by sacrificing dumped energy, improving the system's weighted matching index (WMI) to 0.64, cutting carbon emissions (CEa) up to 59.91 kg CO_2,eq/m².a, and increasing the relative net present value (NPV_rel) to over HK$54.12 million. Further enhancements include introducing two types of ESS. A 2000 kWh static battery reduces exceeded and dumped energy by up to 16.89 % and 12.10 %, improves WMI by over 11.55 %, and modestly improves NPV_rel by sacrificing CEa. Additionally, a proposed vehicle-to-building (V2B) business model encourages public EVs to discharge at unoccupied ports, maintaining profitability in most scenarios and effectively reducing exceeded energy. Although focused on a limited building scale and size, this study uncovers bottlenecks in EV penetration and proposes effective solutions for boosting EV integration under grid constraints. Future research could expand to various building types and scales to broaden the findings.