Abstract:

Publicly available electric vehicle charging hubs are expected to grow, to meet the increasing charging demand of EVs. A dominant class of these will be fast-charging hubs where the EVs will arrive for charging at all hours of the day, get the requested charge, and leave promptly. The profitability of these fast-charging hubs will be highly dependent on the variation of the day-ahead prices of electricity, volatility of the real-time power market, and the randomness of EV charging demand. A novel two-step methodology has been developed to help hubs manage their power purchases in the day-ahead electricity market and adopt dynamic real-time strategies. The methodology involves a mixed integer linear program (MILP) for day-ahead power commitment and a Markov decision process (MDP) model for real-time control actions. The methodology is tested on a fast-charging hub with 150 charging stations and a battery storage system in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey- Maryland interconnection power grid.