Integration of Plug-in Electric Vehicles Into Microgrids as Energy and Reactive Power Providers in Market Environment

Abstract

The concept of electricity markets in the deregulated environment generally refers to energy market and reactive power market is not paid attention as much as it deserves to. However, reactive power plays an important role in distribution networks to improve network conditions such as voltage profile improvement and loss reduction. Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are mobile sources of active and reactive power, capable of being participated in energy market, and also in reactive power market without battery degradation. Active and reactive powers are coupled through the ac power flow equations and branch loading limits, as well as PEVs and synchronous generators capability curves. This paper presents a coupled energy and reactive power market in the presence of PEVs. The objective function is threefold, namely offers cost (for energy market), total payment function (for reactive power market), and lost opportunity cost, all to be minimized. The effectiveness of the proposed coupled energy and reactive power market is studied based on a 134-node microgrid with and without PEV participation.

An Online Coordinated Charging/Discharging Strategy of Plug-in Electric Vehicles in Unbalanced Active Distribution Networks with Ancillary Reactive Service in the Energy Market

“…In recent times, some references such as [24] and [25] have investigated the possibility of using PEVs as a source of reactive power in the reactive market by considering objective functions like minimizing total payment costs and losses in the network, while others have tried to use synchronous generators as a main source for the reactive power [26]. Reference [27] presented a strategic marketplace for reactive power ancillary services for generators/synchronous condensers by considering uniform price auctions and modifying the load flow model.…”

“…Generally, when discussing electricity prices and energy markets, the reactive power market is not considered. However, PEV inverters with their bidirectional power transfer ability can produce both active and reactive power, so there is an opportunity to participate with the reactive power in the energy market [25]. Many studies like [29] and [30] have investigated coordinating PEVs to charge during off-peak hours to prevent overloading of distribution transformers and reduce electricity bills.…”

Operation of Plug-In Electric Vehicles for Voltage Balancing in Unbalanced Microgrids

“…Other services provided in V2G mode [18,13,9] are reactive power support (for instance, Ref. [19] proposes a coupled energy and reactive power market considering the contribution of PEVs), power leveling (i.e., valley filling and peak shaving), and PQ improvement (for instance, harmonic filtering). In addition, in the presence of high penetration of intermittent renewable power generation, the V2G mode can be exploited to use PEVs as storage systems, backup systems, and to balance power fluctuations.…”

Probabilistic day-ahead simultaneous active/reactive power management in active distribution systems

“…An important issue for reactive power pricing is to consider the lost revenue of generators due to reduced active power production. This lost revenue is called lost opportunity cost (LOC) [8,[14][15][16][17]. A coupled market in the presence of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) has been proposed in [15].…”

“…This lost revenue is called lost opportunity cost (LOC) [8,[14][15][16][17]. A coupled market in the presence of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) has been proposed in [15]. The considered objective function that is minimized comprises offer costs related to energy market, total reactive power payments function and LOCs.…”