High Penetration of Electrical Vehicles in Microgrids: Threats and Opportunities

Abstract Given that the microgrid concept is the building block of future electric distribution systems and electrical vehicles (EVs) are the future of transportation market, in this paper, the impact of EVs on the performance of microgrids is investigated. Demand-side participation is used to cope with increasing demand for EV charging. The problem of coordination of EV charging and discharging (with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) functionality) and demand response is formulated as a market-clearing mechanism that accepts bids from the demand and supply sides and takes into account the constraints put forward by different parts. Therefore, a day-ahead market with detailed bids and offers within the microgrid is designed whose objective is to maximize the social welfare which is the difference between the value that consumers attach to the electrical energy they buy plus the benefit of the EV owners participating in the V2G functionality and the cost of producing/purchasing this energy. As the optimization problem is a mixed integer nonlinear programming one, it is decomposed into one master problem for energy scheduling and one subproblem for power flow computation. The two problems are solved iteratively by interfacing MATLAB with GAMS. Simulation results on a sample microgrid with different residential, commercial and industrial consumers with associated demand-side biddings and different penetration level of EVs support the proposed formulation of the problem and the applied methods.