PhD student Talal Khalid with Advisor K. Haran

Maximum demand charges (MDCs) are a well-recognized barrier to the widespread deployment of electric vehicle fast-charging facilities.  Multiple solutions to address the problem have been proposed in the literature and practiced by the US electric utility companies (EUCs).  However, the technoeconomic dependency of these interventions has come under severe criticism, specifically, from an equity perspective for their lack of consideration of the long-term, unintended, local societal consequences.  This work employs contextual engineering, an emerging engineering discipline that recognizes the importance of stakeholder motivations, local knowledge, consultant biases, the partiality of perspectives, unique societal conditions, and community power dynamics, to develop the contextual decision-making methodology.  This methodology adapts the mathematical formulations from the traditional decision-making practice to advance equity in EUC policy interventions. To demonstrate this approach, the study applies the methodology to the MDC problem in Paducah, KY.

Figure 14. The contextual decision-making methodology.