Decentralized Charging of Plug-In Electric Vehicles with Distribution Feeder Overload Control

TL;DR

This paper proposes algorithms for charging Plug-in Electric Vehicles that effectively balance load and prevent distribution feeder overloads, ensuring grid stability as EV adoption increases.

Contribution

It introduces novel charging algorithms that jointly minimize load variance and prevent overloads, addressing a critical challenge in EV integration into power grids.

Findings

Algorithms successfully prevent distribution feeder overloads.

Load variance is significantly reduced with proposed methods.

Enhanced grid stability during high EV charging demand.

Abstract

As the number of charging Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) increase, due to the limited power capacity of the distribution feeders and the sensitivity of the mid-way distribution transformers to the excessive load, it is crucial to control the amount of power through each specific distribution feeder to avoid system overloads that may lead to breakdowns. In this paper we develop, analyze and evaluate charging algorithms for PEVs with feeder overload constraints in the distribution grid. The algorithms we propose jointly minimize the variance of the aggregate load and prevent overloading of the distribution feeders.