Optimal Electric Vehicle Fleet Charging Management with a Frequency Regulation Service

Electric vehicles are able to provide immediate power through the vehicle-to-grid function, and they can adjust their charging power level when in the grid-to-vehicle mode. This allows them to provide ancillary services such as frequency control. Their batteries differ from conventional energy storage systems in that the owner's energy requirement constraint must be met when the vehicles participate in a frequency control system. An optimization problem was defined by considering both the owner satisfaction and frequency control performance. The main contribution of the proposed paper, compared to the literature, are (1) to keep the total available energy stored in the batteries connected to a charging station in an optimal region that favors the frequency regulation capability of the station and the proposed QoS and (2) to consider the optimal region bounded by the efficiency thresholds of the charger to allow for maximum regulation power. The problem is expressed as a multi-criteria optimization problem with time-dependent references. The paper presents an energy management strategy for frequency control, describes a concept of an optimal time-dependent state of charge for electric vehicle charging demands, and considers the power dependence of the electric vehicle charger efficiency. Finally, the simulation results are presented via Matlab/Simulink to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.