Electric power resource provisioning for large scale public EV charging facilities

Abstract

The mainstream adoption of Electric and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (EVs/PHEVs) requires the wide deployment of public charging stations of large scale. Such facilities are essential for this goal, and probably represent the only option for drivers living in densely populated areas. They could also provide complementary service to extend the EV range for drivers who also have access to domicile charging. On the other hand, since these stations will mainly operate during the day, stochastic customer demand exerted on the power grid may threaten its reliability. Hence, the problem of electric power resource provisioning should be carefully considered. In this study, we propose a capacity planning framework by exploiting the stochastic behavior of customer demand at each charging slot in large capacity stations. Our framework assigns a constant power to each charging slot. Thus, aggregated stochastic demand is approximated by a deterministic quantity, at the price of denying service to a very small percentage of customers. Our model leads to significant savings in power provisioning and provides critical insights about the design of charging station.