An optimal regional time-of-use charging price model for electric vehicles

Disorderly charging performances of miraculous electric vehicles (EVs) will bring challenges to security and economy of power system, while the development of the electric power market also contributes to the discussion of price incentive mechanism. Therefore, this paper proposes an optimal regional time-of-use (RTOU) charging price model for electric vehicles. By dividing typical urban zone into four zones, the time-period division of RTOU price is studied by the method of membership function. Subsequently, the performance of user response is analyzed by the elastic coefficient method considering the electricity prices among regions. Finally, minimizing the peak valley difference and charging cost, a model of optimal RTOU electricity price for EVs is established to obtain the peak and valley price settings. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed regional time-of-use charging price model. Also, EVs can be coordinated in both temporal and spatial domains.