An Economic Model Predictive Control for energy management in an electric vehicle’s off-grid charging station

Off-grid electric vehicle (EV) charging stations powered by renewable energy sources represent a promising solution for remote and weak-grid areas, but their operation is challenged by renewable intermittency, limited storage capacity, and battery degradation. This paper investigates an Economic Model Predictive Control (EMPC) framework for the energy management of an off-grid EV charging station equipped with photovoltaic generation, a battery energy storage system, and an auxiliary E-fuel generator. Two complementary EMPC formulations are proposed: a design-oriented one to identify the maximum sustainable charging load under system constraints, and an operational one focused on minimizing generator energy production while limiting battery degradation through an explicit penalty on charge–discharge cycling. Extensive simulation results quantitatively demonstrate that the proposed EMPC framework enables a systematic and transparent trade-off between fuel consumption and battery lifetime. Specifically, the framework successfully minimizes the total fuel cost to €737.39, achieving the lowest fuel cost than the rule-based baseline inverter at €740.72 and the conventional Standard Tracking MPC at (€743.94), while simultaneously maintaining a more balanced and physically sustainable battery lifetime estimate of 12.31 years (compared to 10.58 years achieved by the heuristic logic), thereby effectively satisfying strict operational and reliability requirements.