An Optimization Model for Energy Community Costs Minimization Considering a Local Electricity Market between Prosumers and Electric Vehicles

Abstract

Electric vehicles have emerged as one of the most promising technologies, and their mass introduction may pose threats to the electricity grid. Several solutions have been proposed in an attempt to overcome this challenge in order to ease the integration of electric vehicles. A promising concept that can contribute to the proliferation of electric vehicles is the local electricity market. In this way, consumers and prosumers may transact electricity between peers at the local community level, reducing congestion, energy costs and the necessity of intermediary players such as retailers. Thus, this paper proposes an optimization model that simulates an electric energy market between prosumers and electric vehicles. An energy community with different types of prosumers is considered (household, commercial and industrial), and each of them is equipped with a photovoltaic panel and a battery system. This market is considered local because it takes place within a distribution grid and a local energy community. A mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed to solve the local energy transaction problem. The results suggest that our approach can provide a reduction between 1.6% to 3.5% in community energy costs.

Solar-Powered Charging Networks for Electric Vehicles

“…Demand management is an important topic and considered in many publications [2,19,23,27,28,[32][33][34][35][36]. Most of the past work has been on managing peak power demand.…”

“…The case where EV customers respond to prices for electricity and receive power is different from the dispatchable demand case above, where the grid operator supplies power to EVs as needed to balance supply and demand. The optimization of EV charging and energy storage in batteries as part of smart grid management is an active area of research [19].…”

“…The estimated future size of dispatchable demand in the US with solar-powered charging networks is approximately 100 million EVs with an average of 10 kWh added to each per day or approximately one billion kWh/day in 2040. At that time, electricity from wind and solar energy will be the cheapest option in many locations, which will make demand management much more important than it is now [2,19,[32][33][34][35][36]. Shortly after President Biden signed an executive order to attain a "carbon pollution-free electricity sector no later than 2035; and clean .…”

“…There are significant savings associated with when and where EVs are charged [24,25]. The economic benefits of using batteries in EVs to deliver power to the grid are an active area of research [19]. There are many ways to integrate wind-and solar-generated electricity, EVs, and battery storage into the smart grid, and many of these advances have economic value [28,29,32].…”

Local Electricity Markets for Electric Vehicles: An Application Study Using a Decentralized Iterative Approach

“…A previous work proposed a centralized model to solve the optimal energy trading in a LEM between prosumers and EVs (Faia et al, 2021b). However, the scalability of the adopted centralized model is not enough, and the data privacy can be easily compromised.…”