Optimal Control of PEVs with a Charging Aggregator Considering Regulation Service Provisioning

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are considered the key to reducing fossil fuel consumption and an important part of the smart grid. The plug-in electric vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology in the smart grid infrastructure enables energy flow from PEV batteries to the power grid so that the grid stability is enhanced and the peak power demand is shaped. PEV owners will also benefit from V2G technology, as they will be able to reduce energy cost through proper PEV charging and discharging scheduling. Moreover, power regulation service (RS) reserves have been playing an increasingly important role in modern power markets. It has been shown that by providing RS reserves, the power grid achieves a better match between energy supply and demand in presence of volatile and intermittent renewable energy generation. This article starts with the problem of PEV charging under dynamic energy pricing, properly taking into account the degradation of battery state-of-health (SoH) during V2G operations as well as RS provisioning. An overall optimization throughout the whole parking period is proposed for the PEV and an adaptive control framework is presented to dynamically update the optimal charging/discharging decision at each hour to mitigate the effect of RS tracking error. As more and more PEVs are being plugged into the power grid, the control or management issue of PEV charging arises, since mass unregulated charging processes of PEVs may result in degradation of power quality and damage utility equipments and customer appliances. To solve this problem, this article also presents an SoH-aware charging aggregator design, which decides the control sequences of a group of PEVs. An energy storage system is used in the charging aggregator to do a peak power shaving, and future parking PEVs are properly taken care of. Experimental results show that the proposed optimal charging algorithm minimizes the combination of electricity cost and battery aging cost in the RS provisioning power market. Experimental results also show that the introduction of charging aggregator can significantly reduce the peak power consumption caused by simultaneous PEV charging.