Potential benefits of electric vehicle deployment as responsive reserve in unit commitment

Modernization of electric grid and deregulation of electricity market put forward many tough challenges both technically and economically. Improving the power system reliability is a major task amongst them, which depends on the responsive reserve capacity and its response time in case of contingency. Fast response time and the possibility of Electric Vehicle (EV) participation in deregulated electricity market environment can be exploited in the deterministic scheduling of EV as responsive reserve (RR) in unit commitment (UC) problem to enhance power system reliability at reasonable cost and facilitating economic feasibility of EV deployment. To investigate this concept conventional thermal units are scheduled considering EV as responsive reserve which aims at minimizing the cost for independent system operator (ISO) in satisfying load and reserve requirements under stringent constraints imposed by generation units and yielding extra income through selling EV capacity into reserve markets to maximize the revenue with lower risk of degradation and charge outage. From the results it is observed that in the present scenario, selling EV into reserve market would fetch more revenue than the energy market counterpart and at the same time EV reserve procurement also minimizes the operational cost for ISO when compared to conventional reserve procurement.