Vehicular Energy Network

TL;DR

This paper proposes a vehicular energy network (VEN) that leverages electric vehicles and traffic routes to transport renewable energy from remote sources to urban centers, enhancing power delivery.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized VEN architecture with dynamic wireless charging and provides a mathematical framework and feasibility analysis using real traffic data.

Findings

Substantial renewable energy can be transported to urban centers.

VEN is likely to be profitable with proper routing and settings.

VEN can complement existing power grids and improve energy delivery.

Abstract

The smart grid spawns many innovative ideas, but many of them cannot be easily integrated into the existing power system due to power system constraints, such as the lack of capacity to transport renewable energy in remote areas to the urban centers. An energy delivery system can be built upon the traffic network and electric vehicles (EVs) utilized as energy carriers to transport energy over a large geographical region. A generalized architecture called the vehicular energy network (VEN) is constructed and a mathematically tractable framework is developed. Dynamic wireless (dis)charging allows electric energy, as an energy packet, to be added and subtracted from EV batteries seamlessly. With proper routing, energy can be transported from the sources to destinations through EVs along appropriate vehicular routes. This paper gives a preliminary study of VEN. Models are developed to study its operational and economic feasibilities with real traffic data in the United Kingdom. Our study shows that a substantial amount of renewable energy can be transported from some remote wind farms to London under some reasonable settings and VEN is likely to be profitable in the near future. VEN can complement the power network and enhance its power delivery capability.