Electrification is a key solution to an emissions-free transport sector, but it also poses a number of technical challenges to the power system. On the one side, a proper description of charging behaviour is a cornerstone for electric vehicle (EV) integration in the power system. This is increasingly relevant when considering controllable charging, which makes the assessment of charging behaviour even more challenging. On the other side, controlled EV charging can offer substantial benefits to the power system, but the role of user needs is often neglected. This thesis investigates the technical and economic benefits of EV integration in the power system, taking into account user needs and battery considerations. The initial focus of the thesis is on available data to derive EV charging profiles. Main sources of data are classified into three groups - surveys, car trials, and charger trials - and valuable information for the modelling of charging profiles is identified per each source. To understand how these sources can be used in EV studies, a minimum level of data for deriving EV charging profiles is defined: battery capacity, charging power, plug-in state of charge (SOC), plug-in/out time and charged energy. Since these data are often not directly available, guidelines and limitations to using available information and avoiding assumptions are provided. An additional complication arises when considering controlled charging profiles because their derivation depends on users’ willingness to participate in controlled charging, whose knowledge is still limited on a large scale. This leads to the second direction of this thesis, where techno-economic benefits of controllable charging are investigated by assessing how they can be used to generate value for end-users.