Neighborhood-Level Collaborative Fair Charging Scheme for Electric Vehicles

There are increasing numbers of electric vehicles (EV) on roads and plugged into the power grid. The total number of these vehicles operating in the US is projected to reach 15% of all vehicles in service within the next 20 years. This trend brings a huge challenge to the current electric grid system in terms of power reliability and quality. It would be prohibitively expensive to just upgrade and increase transmission and distribution system capacity to meet the demands of these EVs without appropriate management and control. To address this issue, we present a distributed, collaborative neighborhood-level scheme for controls of EV chargers. The proposed scheme allocates the power to EV chargers in a fair fashion and ensures that the distribution infrastructure would not be over loaded. In addition, the proposed control scheme allows to follow demand response signals released by utilities in a collaborative way. A simple implementation, which benefits both utilities and residential users, is provided and tested. This paper also discusses the potential use of the proposed scheme for other controllable electrical appliances in residential houses.