Smart Charging Strategies for Electric Vehicles in Smart Grid

The adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) has been proliferating over the past ten years, and EVs are expected to become much more widespread over the next decade. The flexibility offered by the grid-tied EVs will allow electricity providers to harness the massive storage capacity, through opportunities such as flexible smart charging, Virtual Power Plants, and vehicle to grid (V2G) or vehicle to premises (V2P). However, smart charging, along with V2G and V2P, impose many challenges to the EV vehicle owners. EV owners must be able to set maximum and minimum charge points for the next planned trip and make their vehicle available to be charged or discharged when parked at home or work. Design and development of these strategies will significantly impact on EV owners, the National Electricity Market, energy retailers and power systems, especially in distribution networks. Therefore, this project aims to develop strategies that will help EV owners and Fleet Managers with smart charging decisions and aggregation of EV resources to support the grid, through 1) optimised smart charging strategies to minimise operational costs of EVs, and 2) to help shave peak load, address minimum load risks, control grid active and reactive power, and optimise renewable energy use.