Scheduling Plug-in Vehicles in the Vehicle-to-Grid Concept [abstract]

Abstract

With the President Obama's energy plan to put one million of plug-in hybrid vehicles on the road by 2015, these vehicles will be a large source of energy storage. The batteries on these vehicles can either provide power to the grid when parked, referred to as the vehicle- to-grid (V2G) concept or consume power from the grid to charge the batteries on the vehicles. Success of the sophisticated automatic V2G research depends on efficient scheduling of gridable vehicles in constrained parking lots. V2G can reduce dependencies on small expensive units in the existing power systems as energy storage that can decrease running costs. It can efficiently manage load fluctuation, peak load; however, it increases spinning reserves and reliability. As number of gridable vehicles in V2G is much higher than small units of existing systems, unit commitment (UC) with V2G is more complex than basic UC for only thermal units. Advanced intelligent scheduling techniques are needed to maximize the benefits to the grid and to the vehicles. This paper describes these intelligent techniques and presents some typical results.