Smart charging without rebound peaks: Wholesale price feedback limits distribution grid peaks from price-responsive electric vehicles

Lion Hirth

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Studies on price-optimized EV charging consistently find that the common price signal synchronizes charging of the entire fleet of cars in the cheapest hours and creates new "rebound" load peaks in low-voltage grids. Almost all of these studies treat wholesale prices as exogenous, i.e., unaffected by the shifting EV load. This paper argues that this assumption overstates the problem: charging in low-price hours raises the wholesale price in those hours, which spreads charging across hours in equilibrium. I simulate price-optimized charging under real-time prices calibrated to German 2025 data. Even when adjusting for the increase in electricity demand, the coincident import peak of the local grid rises by 260%. After adding a model of equilibrium wholesale prices that takes the price-quantity feedback into account, the increase is reduced to a mere 5%. Allowing for vehicle-to-grid, the export peak rises by 115% under exogenous prices and falls by 6% under endogenous prices. The result holds across vehicle and charging parameters, charging constraints, renewable scenarios, network charges, price functions, peak measures, and simulation assumptions. Rebound peaks remain possible where vehicle adoption runs ahead of the national average or where charging power is high, but they are much smaller than the literature consensus suggests.

Date: 2026-10, Revised 2026-10
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