Exploring the impact of EVs on the power grid with high penetration of RES

Abstract

Electric Vehicles (EVs) provide new opportunities for the power grid, especially with high penetration of Renewable Energy Source (RES). For instance, EVs can be utilized to store energy and then provide energy to the power grid during the high demand periods, improve power factor, and to mitigate the over/under-voltage problems. Yet, EVs introduce new challenges for the power grid, e.g., uncontrolled charging at the early evening can aggravate the peak power demand problem. This work focuses on smart strategies for charging EVs. Based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP), we introduce two smart strategies for charging the EVs, namely, the constant demand and the profit maximization approaches. Additionally, we explored the usage of rule-based control mechanisms to deal with over/under-voltage and reactive power compensation. We looked into different EV-applications in the power grid and performed comprehensive simulation experiments. We simulate the different components of the power grid as well as the data communication network. The open source power simulator (OpenDSS) was employed to simulate the power grid components and the discrete event simulator (OMNeT++) was used to simulate data communication system. These two simulators are integrated in one framework called (SGsim), which can be used to explore different ICT-based smart grid applications. The R tool has been used to solve an optimization problem to get the optimal schedule for charging EVs.