A control strategy incorporating multiple EV charging stations for an islanded micro‐grid energy management and voltage regulation

Abstract

An electric vehicle (EV) charging station control strategy (CSCS) is proposed for proper power‐sharing among various components of an islanded microgrid (MG), consisting of the photovoltaic (PV) system, the wind energy conversion system (WECS), variable load (critical and non‐critical), multiple charging stations (CSs) and the dump load (LD). The proposed control strategy is examined in three distinct cases with varying operating conditions owing to solar irradiance, wind speed and load variations. For proper energy management (EM) and voltage regulation (VR), the diverse EVs have varying battery capacities parked in the multiple CSs to either absorb or deliver power through a two‐way power flow between the islanded MG system and the EV‐based CSs, which is reliant on the supply and demand (S&D) energy difference. The simulation is executed via the MATLAB software and two different modes—excess power mode (EPM) and deficient power mode (DPM)—are employed to validate the proposed CSCS's competency. For a realistic assessment of the proposition, the results are also verified by using a hardware‐in‐loop (HIL) real‐time (RT) OPAL‐RT simulator (OP5700). Furthermore, the findings from MATLAB and the OPAL‐RT simulator are compared to establish the robustness of the proposed strategy.