Distributed Charging Control of Plug-In Electric Vehicles via the Stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are likely to become very popular in the future. With a large number of PEVs across the world, the batteries of PEVs may form a huge energy storage system which can serve as both controllable power loads and power sources. This can help the power grid to regulate the frequency by minimizing the expected imbalance between load and generation under the circumstance of high load uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm to solve this stochastic minimization problem. The algorithm is very easy to implement. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm works well and can benefit the power grid in helping frequency regulation.