Feasibility Study for Electric Vehicle Usage in a Microgrid Integrated With Renewable Energy

Electric vehicles (EVs) are getting increased attention due to their potential as reliable sources of transportation. In addition, EVs can be employed as a temporary energy storage system (ESS) in electrical power systems using the grid-to-vehicle (G2V), charging phase, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G), discharging phase, technologies. Renewable energy resources (RERs) are a clean and sustainable form of energy but are often intermittent in nature. Integrating ESS with RERs can mitigate the unpredictable fluctuations of the electrical power generated from RERs, but the investment cost of installing ESS is often high. In this article, we investigate the financial benefit obtained from using EVs as a temporary ESS in a microgrid (MG) integrated with a Photovoltaic (PV) plant. The problem formulation considers the capital cost of the EV charging stations (EVCSs), feed-in tariff (FIT), and incentives given to the EVs’ owners. A planning algorithm is developed to find the required number of EVCSs needed to maximize the profit of the suggested system. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is illustrated using the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) MG. Four different final state of charge (SC) of EV scenarios are considered. Results show that the suggested system can be economically and technically feasible. Employing EVs, in G2V and V2G schemes, decreases the MG dependency on the grid and yields annual profit as well.