Pricing and Electric Vehicle Charging Equilibria

TL;DR

This paper analyzes equilibria in EV charging games, revealing that herding occurs only at low EV adoption and exploring how pricing strategies influence equilibrium types under different dissatisfaction models.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model accounting for dissatisfaction costs and distinguishes conditions for different equilibrium types in EV charging games.

Findings

Herding occurs only at lower EV uptake levels.

Non-distributed equilibria are the only feasible outcome under logistic dissatisfaction.

Price discrimination is necessary to induce distributed equilibria in linear dissatisfaction models.

Abstract

We study equilibria in an Electric Vehicle (EV) charging game, a cost minimization game inherent to decentralized charging control strategy for EV power demand management. In our model, each user optimizes its total cost which is sum of direct power cost and the indirect dissatisfaction cost. We show that, taking player specific price independent dissatisfaction cost in to account, contrary to popular belief, herding only happens at lower EV uptake. Moreover, this is true for both linear and logistic dissatisfaction functions. We study the question of existence of price profiles to induce a desired equilibrium. We define two types of equilibria, distributed and non-distributed equilibria, and show that under logistic dissatisfaction, only non-distributed equilibria are possible by feasibly setting prices. In linear case, both type of equilibria are possible but price discrimination is necessary to induce distributed equilibria. Finally, we show that in the case of symmetric EV users, mediation cannot improve upon Nash equilibria.