Price-Optimized EV and Heat-Pump Scheduling Can Exceed Uncoordinated Feeder Peaks
Electric vehicles and heat pumps add large, time-flexible loads to low-voltage distribution feeders. When each household independently minimizes its own charging cost against the same electricity price, this flexible demand piles into the cheapest hours, and the resulting synchronization can stress the feeder more than uncoordinated operation does. This work quantifies that effect on a rural low-voltage feeder (97 buses, 250 kVA transformer) across 160 simulation runs spanning seven scenarios, four seasons, and electric-vehicle, heat-pump, and photovoltaic penetration from 0 to 90 %. At 30 % penetration of each device, this decentralized cost minimization drives the transformer to 253 % of rated capacity, more than twice the level of uncoordinated charging, and up to 478 % at 90 % electric-vehicle penetration, with the first undervoltage violations at the far end of the longest feeder arm. The ranking is device-mix dependent: each 30 pp of heat-pump penetration adds about twelve times more to the price-based peak than to any fixed schedule, so price-based scheduling becomes the worst strategy once heat pumps are present. Only a central schedule that explicitly caps the transformer removes these demand-driven violations, while at high photovoltaic penetration a summer floor from midday reverse power flow bounds what any demand-side strategy can achieve. A regulated time-variable grid tariff added to the spot price provides no relief for heat-pump-driven synchronization and only marginal relief for electric-vehicle-driven synchronization in autumn. The simulation and optimization code is available at https://github.com/lukas-wagner/SynchronizationEffectsAnalysis.