Regulated Charging of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles for Minimizing Load Variance in Household Smart Microgrid

With the advent of the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology is attracting increasing attention recently. It is believed that the V2G option can aid to improve the efficiency and reliability of the power grid, as well as reduce overall cost and carbon emission. In this paper, the possibility of smoothing out the load variance in a household microgrid by regulating the charging patterns of family PHEVs is investigated. First, the mathematic model of the problem is built up. Then, the case study is conducted, which demonstrates that, by regulating the charging profiles of the PHEVs, the variance of load power can be dramatically reduced. Third, the energy losses and the subsidy mechanism are discussed. Finally, the impacts of the requested net charging quantities and the battery capacity of PHEVs on the performance of the regulated charging are investigated.