The impact of electric vehicles and mobile boundary expansions on the realization of zero-emission office buildings

The critical solutions to the future global target of the carbon-neutral society rely on a comprehensive and integrated consideration of both the building and transportation sectors. However, most of the past studies only considered the local interactions between the buildings and the locally-charged electric vehicles (EVs), which significantly limits the utilization of the EV storage capacities. In this study, we have investigated a hybrid photovoltaic and wind turbine supported zero-emission office building (ZEB)which is interacted with a number of electric vehicles. Furthermore, a novel control strategy, called “Boundary Expansion Scenario”, has been proposed, where the boundary of the ZEB-EV interactions can be expanded from the conventional local parking to the remote parking, so that the EV batteries can be fully utilized regardless of the parking location. The impact of the renewable energy system, the Vehicle-to-Building (V2B)interactions and the boundary expansion scenarios on the zero-emission performance of the office building and the EVs have been comprehensively investigated. The research results show that by merely activating the V2B function without the “Boundary Expansion Scenario”, the V2B capability can only lead to less than 5% of the enhancement of the matching capabilities, since 93.4% of the surplus renewable electricity occur mainly during the non-parking hours. However, by further activating the “Boundary Expansion Scenario”, the net zero-emission system can simultaneously enable the features of the significantly enhanced matching capabilities (the OEFe and OEMe both at 62%), the much intensified building-vehicle interactions (the E_B2V at 18.73 kWh/m².a and the E_V2B at 14.87 kWh/m².a), and an almost full renewable coverage of the EV storages (the renewable energy ratio at 96.9%).