The idea of grid friendly charging is to use electricity from the grid to charge batteries when electricity is available in surplus and cheap. There are several ways of achieving this, for example using droop control, using night time electricity tariffs, or using smart metering. The goal is twofold: to avoid putting additional load on the electricity grid and power generation, and to reduce the cost to the consumer. This paper looks at the saving potential when charging an electric car using real time tariffs provided by a smart meter, using the Ameren tariffs in Illinois as an example. If prices are known in advance (day-ahead pricing), the optimization only requires picking the cheapest time slots for charging the battery. Further savings can be made by using real time prices that are not known in advance, but the optimization problem then depends on price prediction models, and it becomes much more difficult to solve. This paper presents a simple suboptimal approach, and it quantifies the potential improvements that could be made using more sophisticated price predictions.The result is that cost savings in the order of about 50 USD (1/3 of the electricity costs) are feasible if a fast charger is used using real time pricing. The scale of the savings is such that complex optimization strategies are not worthwhile, and for the foreseeable future simple solutions are expected to be more cost effective.

The idea of grid friendly charging is to use electricity from the grid to charge batteries when electricity is available in surplus and cheap. The goal is twofold: to avoid putting additional load on the electricity grid and to reduce the cost to the consumer. To achieve this, a smart meter and a tariff with variable electricity prices has to be in place. In Day Ahead tariff (DA), prices are announced in advance for the next day, and this information can be used to select the cheapest times to charge the battery by the required amount. The optimization method is very simple, and it only has to be run once per day. However, the balance of supply and demand is not fully known in advance. Therefore Real Time Pricing (RTP) tariff supplies electricity at spot market rate depending on the current balance. This makes the charging process less predictable because it adds a stochastic element, but it does offer the potential of higher savings if future prices can be predicted with a reasonable degree of accuracy. This paper proposes an optimal controller based on a stochastic dynamic program (SDP), which predicts future price changes from available data. The controller takes into account price variability via a simple grid model that allows of unexpected price rises and a gradual return to a normal grid price. The DP algorithm has two variables, the state of charge (SoC) and the current electricity cost. It traces the expected total cost based on the stochastic model and makes a decision 'to charge or not' to minimize the expected (average) total cost. The results show that in case of a positive probability of price rises, the time to charge is chosen slightly before the lowest expected cost during the night. This is a rational solution, because waiting longer does increase the risk of an unexpected price spike. In the trivial case of a zero probability of unexpected price rises, the solution converges to the one found by the previous deterministic optimization algorithm.

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The goal of grid friendly charging is to avoid putting additional load on the electricity grid when it is heavily loaded already, and to reduce the cost of charging to the consumer. In a smart metering system, Day Ahead tariff (DA) prices are announced in advance for the next day. This information can be used for a simple optimization control, to select to charge at cheapest times. However, the balance of supply and demand is not fully known in advance and the Real-Time Prices (RTP) are therefore likely to be different at times. There is always a risk of a sudden price change, hence adding a stochastic element to the optimization in turn requiring dynamic control to achieve optimal time selection. A stochastic dynamic program (SDP) controller which takes this problem into account has been made and proven by simulation in a previous paper.Since there are differences between the DA and the RTP tariff, this paper proposes a (1) predictor to create an unbiased estimate of the RTP tariff based on available data. It uses a regression on historical data to find the best prediction of the expected price. Finally, a (2) case study based on data from the Illinois Electricity Grid prices is presented to validate the SDP controller over several years of data. The stochastic optimization uses the RTP prices effectively, getting very close to the globally optimal charging price. However, the predictor achieves only a slight reduction in prediction uncertainty with this data sate, and it has a negligible effect on cost. This means that DA prices can be used as a fair prediction of RTP charging cost here. The SDPM successfully reacts in the case study and leads to savings on charging costs over the years presented.