A pricing strategy for electric vehicle charging in residential areas considering the uncertainty of charging time and demand

In residential areas, the hours when commuters charge their electric vehicles (EVs) after work often coincide highly with the peak residential electricity consumption hours, which will create security risks to the power system and affect the normal operation of the power grid. In contrast to the inevitability and immutability of the use of household appliances, the duration and time period of charging electric vehicles can be changed. This paper addresses the aforementioned problem by time-of-use (TOU) electricity price, which can guide residents to stagger hours to charge, achieving the objective of peak load shifting. Taking residential areas as the research scope, considering the uncertainty of EV users' homecoming time, departure time and charging demand, the article proposes a bi-level planning model for pricing electric vehicle charging. The lower level is a minimization model of charging costs for individual users, which can acquire the charging load of all vehicles for multiple days. The upper level is a robust optimization model of TOU electricity price considering uncertain factors, which obtains the fast and slow charging prices. It has been demonstrated that the model increases grid stability by 43.46%.