Electric Vehicle Charging Coordination using Availability Information

The market share of electric vehicles (EV) will increase until 2020. In order to avoid peaks and distribution system instability, charging of EVs has to be coordinated. Several coordination mechanisms have been proposed, including centralised charging scheduling, and auction designs, where EV owners need to actively bid for electricity. However, if charging decisions lie entirely with the EV owners, system beneficial charging needs to be incentivized via a price signal.

The sustainability of EVs is only ensured if a high share of renewable energy is used to satisfy their load. The aim of our research is to find a flexible tariff, which considers  the in-feed of a fixed portfolio of intermittent renewable energy and charging decisions by electric vehicle owners. The objective is to minimize cost while ensuring a maximum supply of renewable energy to EV owners. We show that even the highly aggregated information of charging availability can significantly increase the performance of such a tariff generation algorithm, by incentivising charging when few vehicles are connected to the grid.

In Power TAC (Trading Agent Competition) this corresponds to a strategy for an uncertain price environment in which a broker with a renewable energy portfolio would deviate from the market price, guaranteeing minimum risk exposure.