The economic analysis of electric vehicle aggregators participating in energy and regulation markets considering battery degradation

Electric vehicles (EVs), which are eco-friendly and energy-efficient, create an alternative solution to achieve the sustainable and low-emission traffic system when coupled with the renewable energy sources. EVs can serve as distributed energy storage devices to provide vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services for power grids. However, the extra battery degradation would be incurred for EVs. In this context, it is essential to investigate the economic viability of EVs to offer V2G services. It should be noted that few attentions are given to the economic evaluation of EV aggregators participating in the current electricity market framework for the falling battery costs. Herein, the EV aggregator is a new entity for employing large-scale EVs to provide V2G services in electricity markets to explore business opportunities. In this paper, in order to gain the optimal market participation strategy of EV aggregators, an optimization model is formulated with the target of the profit maximization while considering the battery degradation costs. After that, the generalized reduced gradient (GRG) method is used to solve this nonlinear programming problem. Moreover, the New York competitive market is taken as the case study for the economic evaluation. Results reveal that it is highly likely that EV aggregators operate at a loss under the current battery costs; however, with the decrease of battery costs, there will be huge opportunities for EV aggregators to employ EVs to earn profits in electricity markets in the near future.