Electric Vehicle Smart Charging to Maximize Renewable Energy Usage in a Single Residence

We pose and solve a smart charging problem for a single residence equipped with an electric vehicle (EV), energy storage, and solar panels. The smart charging problem is cast as a quadratic program in order to exploit existing solution algorithms and to efficiently detect problem feasibility. The objective function consists of a weighted sum of four performance metrics: cost of electricity from the utility, usage of renewable energy, charging urgency and battery degradation. Of these, the renewable energy metric is a novel focus of the work and considers both local and remote sources of renewable energy. Benefits of the proposed smart charging strategy to the EV owner are multiple: charging costs can be minimized in a price-uncertain environment, renewable energy usage can be maximized, and battery lifetime can be extended. These benefits are obtained with minimal computational effort due to our convex problem formulation. They also position our proposed smart charging algorithm for both embedded implementation and large scale simulation studies, in contrast to many non-convex formulations existing in the literature.