Abstract

There has been a drastic increase in electric vehicle (EV) adoption in recent years, a trend that is expected to continue in the future. This increase in EV adoption is expected to distort traditional load profiles, leading to higher load peaks and prolonged overload of the existing power system infrastructure, especially distribution lines, due to their limited power transfer capacity. This paper addresses the challenge of fast-growing EVs by projecting future load scenarios based on different levels of EV adoption and charging schedules, followed by a thermal analysis of underground power distribution cables under these higher loadings. The analysis in this paper uses real distribution network and metering data, from CenterPoint Energy that serves the greater Houston area, to estimate cable thermal degradation and predict cable failure probabilities, considering increased EV charging load. The results indicate that single-phase laterals branching out of distribution feeders are not expected to be greatly impacted due to their relatively low number of customers each serves, while the main three-phase distribution feeders, on the other hand, are expected to suffer from a substantial lifetime reduction due to higher adoption of EVs in their service area.

Index Terms

Cable Degradation, Cable Thermal Modeling, Electric Vehicles, EV Load Projection, Machine Learning, Power Distribution Network, Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Cite this paper:

Jesus Silva-Rodriguez, Elias Raffoul, Linhan Fang, John D. Wright, Rida Fatima, Gregory J. Boyle, Karim Mohamed, Jhonny Di Girolamo, Eric Easton, and Xingpeng Li, “Cable Degradation Estimation and Remaining Useful Life Prediction for Distribution Networks with High EV Penetration”, arXiv, Nov. 2025.