Leveraging owners' flexibility in smart charge/discharge scheduling of electric vehicles to support renewable energy integration

High integration of intermittent renewable energy sources (RES), predominantly wind power, has created complexities in power system operations. In addition, large fleets of Electric Vehicles (EVs) increase the uncertainty on electricity consumption significantly. Thus, an uncoordinated charging process will further complicate the grid scheduling. In this work, we propose a coordinated scheduling algorithm for charge/discharge of aggregated EV fleets to maximize the integration of wind generation and minimize the charging cost for EV owners in a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) setup. Challenges for people participation in V2G, such as battery degradation and insecurity about unexpected events, are also addressed. The real-time charge/discharge scheduling problem is formulated as a multi-objective mixed-integer quadratic programming problem that the aggregator takes advantage of real-time communication in smart grid to frequently update the EV schedule with updated real-time information about EV availabilities, wind generation forecast, and electricity price. Simulations demonstrate significant increase in wind utilization and reduction in charging cost and battery degradation compared to the uncontrolled charging scenario.