Western Power Distribution Data Challenge 2: Estimating EV Charger Demand

This is the second of three Western Power Distribution (WPD) short data challenges! The aims of these challenges include:

1. Demonstrating the value in making data openly available

2. Increasing the visibility of some of the challenges network operators face

3. Increase the understanding of the different ways to tackle some of these problems

4. Providing high quality and accurate benchmarks with which to enable innovation and research

This challenge aims to estimate the increased demand created on primary substations by the installation of electric vehicle (EV) chargers. High uptakes of EVs will cause more strain on the distribution networks, especially at the low voltage level where there is limited headroom for high demand technologies such as EVs. Unfortunately, the amount of EV chargers installed, and hence the potential extra demand on a network, may be unknown, even to a distribution network operator (DNOs). However, DNOs do monitor the demand at the substation level and this shows the aggregated demand from all connected appliances and, in addition, many DNOs do have example data for EV demand. The ask for this challenge is whether this information can be combined with other data to help predict the increased demand generated from EV chargers on a network.

All the slides from the kick-off and other information can be found on the LinkedIn group and the recording from the kick-off event will be uploaded shortly after the event. The challenge page is here: https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/1324