Real-Time Electric Vehicle Smart Charging at Workplaces: A Real-World Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time EV smart charging algorithm tested in a real-world workplace setting, optimizing costs while accommodating uncertain EV departure times and arrivals using scenario generation and certainty equivalent control.

Contribution

It introduces a novel real-time charging algorithm that is agnostic to EV state-of-charge and departure time, validated with real-world data from a Google campus.

Findings

Cost savings compared to status quo

Effective handling of uncertain EV departure times

Validated with real-world data from Google campus

Abstract

We study a real-time smart charging algorithm for electric vehicles (EVs) at a workplace parking lot in order to minimize electricity cost from time-of-use electricity rates and demand charges while ensuring that the owners of the EVs receive adequate levels of charge. Notably, due to real-world constraints, our algorithm is agnostic to both the state-of-charge and the departure time of the EVs and uses scenario generation to account for each EV's unknown future departure time as well as certainty equivalent control to account for the unknown EV arrivals in the future. Real-world charging data from a Google campus in California allows us to build realistic models of charging demand for each day of the week. We then compare various results from our smart charging algorithm to the status quo for a two week period at a Google parking location.