Enabling Grid Voltage Support Using the Electric Vehicles' Storage

In the future, electric vehicles (EV) are going to evolve into conventional transportation objects. In the past years, researchers have studied the design of EVs, the possible topologies of the converters to be implemented and control algorithms that enable higher efficiency, reliability and controllability of the EV system. Since the number of installed EV units is going to become considerable, their impact on the existing system needs to be carefully analyzed. One of the very important EV features is the possibility of providing ancillary service to the grid, i.e. contributing to the grid support activities during the grid disturbances. This is possible in vehicle-to-grid (V2G) operation mode. In this paper, this particular functionality was investigated in the system that comprises a battery charger for an EV and photovoltaic (PV) based distributed generation source connected to the grid. The researchers have focused on the voltage sags as one of the most interesting grid disturbances. Using the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experimental setup, through various emulation scenarios, the proposed control algorithms were tested and their performance validated.