Electric Autonomous Vehicle Charging and Parking Coordination for Vehicle-to-Grid Voltage Regulation with Renewable Energy

Power system operators face challenges of the increasing penetration level of renewable energy sources (RESs) such as out-of-limit voltage problems in distribution networks. Vehicle-to-Grid is one of the promising technologies to mitigate the voltage fluctuations by using the battery storage of electric vehicles (EVs). On the other hand, the autonomous vehicle (AV) is believed to be the next generation transport that can navigate on the road without active control of human driver. Full autonomy of AVs actuated by electric battery supports additional advantages over the ordinary EV. In this paper, we aim at coordinating the charging and parking schedule of a fleet of electric AVs to mitigate voltage variations in the power system. We formulate the charging and parking coordination problem as a mixed integer quadratic program (MIQP), which can be solved by a standard MIQP solver. Simulation on a modified 15-bus distribution system is performed and the results show that it is effective to regulate voltage by incorporating a limited number of EAVs based on our model.