Improving Electric Vehicle Charging Coordination Through Area Pricing

Abstract

M eeting charging demands of large electric vehicle fleets will raise electrical load significantly and may pose challenges for today's power system. Appropriate coordination of electric vehicle charging can reduce these threats. Acknowledging the interdependency between the transportation and the power system created by electric vehicles, we develop a charging coordination model based on German mobility data. We extend the prior work by explicitly accounting for both the temporal and the spatial dimension. We are thus able to analyze the loads from price-based EV fleet charging while at the same time accounting for distribution grid constraints. Furthermore, we propose a heuristic charging strategy based on limited trip and price information. Our results show that the sole use of time-based electricity prices for the coordination of electric vehicle charging produces high load spikes independent of the charging strategies and power levels. These peaks are induced by simultaneous charging activity and may cause stability problems within distribution grids in residential areas. To mitigate these load spikes, we introduce a spatial price component that reflects local capacity utilization. These local prices induce both a temporal and spatial shift of charging activity that mitigates the load spikes.

Dynamic Pricing for Electric Vehicle Charging—A Literature Review

“…An example is the work of Flath et al [89], which deals with the setting of charging prices for multiple locations (e.g., charging at home and charging at work) with the goal to reduce the peak loads arising at these locations. The basic idea is to shift the load not only temporally but also spatially.…”

An Electric Vehicle Charging Management Scheme Based on Publish/Subscribe Communication Framework

“…By modifying the content for information publication, the proposed P/S communication framework can also support the battery replacement scenario [26] or the pricing concerning [21]. Further to these, since our focus in this article is a proposal of communication framework, deploying RSUs at appropriate places to improve the charging performance is left to our future work.…”

Evaluation of Optimization-Based EV Charging Scheduling with Load Limit in a Realistic Scenario

“…The first is to minimize the peak under the constraint that all charging requirements have to be fulfilled. This can be realized in different ways, like the use of an intelligent charging control [1,2], of stationary batteries [3,4], of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology [5][6][7], or of dynamic pricing strategies [8][9][10]. A drawback of such methods is that, even though the peak load is minimized, it can still be in an undesirably high range.…”