Transportation Sustainability

For our final project in Transportation Sustainability, our eight-person team modeled how managed bidirectional EV charging would affect PG&E's distribution grid under California's 2035 zero-emission vehicle mandate, using four feeders in Alameda County as a case study. We combined PG&E's Integration Capacity Analysis hosting capacity with hourly base load profiles and projected 2035 charging demand from Berkeley's energy control lab, then built a stress-weighted load-shifting model where 80% of charging could flex toward low-stress hours while preserving daily energy.

Managed bidirectional charging reduced peak feeder overload by 30–66% on three of four feeders and eliminated overload entirely on the fourth. We then priced the overloads through a five-tier cost model aligned with PG&E's Distribution Deferral Opportunity Report, discounting future upgrades at PG&E's 7.5% cost of capital over a ten-year horizon. Three of the four feeders showed positive net present value savings of $790K to $1.12M; the fourth cost more under managed charging because charger deployment outweighed avoided upgrades.

The equity analysis used CalEnviroScreen population characteristic percentiles to test whether benefits accrued where strain was worst. Feeders serving higher-burden communities had higher unmanaged overload and higher upgrade costs; managed charging reduced both, but did not close the gap. We supplemented the quantitative work with four expert interviews — academia, a PG&E planner, and an EV-behavior researcher — which reinforced the finding that the binding constraints on V2G are regulatory, behavioral, and institutional rather than technical. The work won Berkeley's 2025 Green Swan Award.