Electric Vehicle Integration - Distribution System Integration Tool (EVI-DiST) is a co-simulation software platform for modeling, analyzing, and controling grid-scale EV charging integration from primary distribution feeders to secondary network levels.
EVI-DiST has the following core capabilities:
- It provides high-fidelity modeling to utility planners for better monitoring and control of increased EV charging loads within their territory
- It assesses impact of increasing EV adoption on distribution systems and implements practical control strategies for grid operators to counter expected at scale EV charging load
- EVI-DiST has a bottom-up modeling approach that includes distributed energy resource (DER) and building load data to provide a clear understanding of non-EV charging base load.
- It allows evaluation of both fixed control methods and methods with real-time grid and/or vehicle feedback and responses
- It features an interactive web-based dashboard that enhances user interaction and data visualization capabilities.
EVI-DiST has the following analysis functionalities:
- Impact on service transformers (e.g., loading, temperature, and degradation)
- Impact on feeder-level loading
- Impact on service voltage profiles
- Descriptive statistics
- percentage of load reduction with smart charge management (SCM)
- Comparison of different SCM implementations
You can access all installation and usage details of EVI-DiST on the documentation page: https://github.com/NREL/EVI-Dist/
The recommended way to use EVI-DiST is through the interactive dashboard. After setting up the environment, users can interact with EVI-DiST from their web browser without having to run the code in any IDE. The command line interface and Python interactive notebook examples could be added in future releases.
EVI-DiST requires the use of the Anaconda Python distribution. Users who do not use Anaconda will have to install the required packages manually. Refer to EVI-Dist/environment.yaml for the required packages.
- After cloning or forking the repository, in the root directory
EVI-Dist/, run the following command and follow the command line prompts to create a conda environment:
conda env create -f ./environment.yaml- The created environment will be named
dist. To activate the conda environment enter the following command:
conda activate dist- If all packages successfully installed, see the Run Instructions for how to run an EVI-EnSite simulation.
If the installation was successful, the user can immediately run the following code in the EVI-Dist/ directory to start EVI-Dist. EVI-Dist's dashboard interface will open in the default browser as shown in Figure below.
python run.py
You can also access the documentation locally (after installation) by clicking the DOCUMENTATION PAGE button at the top of the page shown below.
For questions or more information, please contact: EVI-DiST@nrel.gov