Electric Vehicles, Smart Charging and Smart Grids

This work analyzes the advantages of using smart charging strategies for electric vehicles (EVs) in a smart grid. It is aimed at comparing the system performance (in terms of both user satisfaction and utility profit) obtained when using dumb management strategies in which vehicles are charged at a fixed rate and just when they are plugged into the grid, or smart strategies in which the charging rate is dynamically adapted to the actual grid load conditions and the charging schedule is defined according to a smarter priority criterion then the arrival time of the user into the grid. Simulations carried out by using an ad-hoc tool developed by the Authors in the Matlab environment show that smart strategies can allow a considerable increase of both the user satisfaction and the utility profit with respect to dumb approaches. This performance improvement is obtained at the cost of introducing communication features between the grid and the chargers in order to implement the said smart dynamic energy allocation strategies. Thus, the analysis performed clearly evidences the crucial importance of developing a smart grid infrastructure to sustain an actual large penetration of EVs.