Charging Electric Vehicles in the Smart City: A Survey of Economy-driven Approaches

TL;DR

This survey reviews economic-driven approaches for EV charging in smart cities, emphasizing market structures, incentives, and bidirectional energy flows to optimize societal benefits and grid sustainability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification and comparison of economic models for EV charging, including unidirectional and bidirectional energy flow scenarios.

Findings

Market structure impacts EV behavior and societal benefits.

Economic models vary in supporting unidirectional and bidirectional flows.

Identifies gaps and future directions in economic EV charging strategies.

Abstract

Electric Vehicles (EVs), as their penetration increases, are not only challenging the sustainability of the power grid, but also stimulating and promoting its upgrading. Indeed, EVs can actively reinforce the development of the Smart Grid if their charging processes are properly coordinated through two-way communications, possibly benefiting all types of actors. Because grid systems involve a large number of actors with nonaligned objectives, we focus on the economic and incentive aspects, where each actor behaves in its own interest. We indeed believe that the market structure will directly impact the actors' behaviors, and as a result the total benefits that the presence of EVs can earn the society, hence the need for a careful design. This survey provides an overview of economic models considering unidirectional energy flows, but also bidirectional energy flows, i.e., with EVs temporarily providing energy to the grid. We describe and compare the main approaches, summarize the requirements on the supporting communication systems, and propose a classification to highlight the most important results and lacks.