The rapid integration of renewable energy is increasing the need for fast and sustained load-side frequency regulation, and public electric vehicle (EV) charging networks are promising providers. Their participation, however, is constrained by the volatile charging demand and strict service requirements, which make it difficult to balance regulation revenue with charging quality. This paper proposes a three-layer coordinated framework for multi-site charging networks participating in secondary frequency regulation, comprising market bidding, rolling planning, and fast-response tracking. At the market layer, baseline charging schedules are co-optimized with symmetric regulation capacity bids. At the planning layer, completion margin and progress protection constraints are introduced as tractable service safeguards that preserve charging continuity and deadline compliance. At the execution layer, coordinator-assisted distributed station-level tracking and charger-level urgency-aware allocation track automatic generation control (AGC) commands while correcting the charging progress in real time. The station-level problem is decomposed into local box-constrained subproblems coordinated by a scalar dual signal, enabling real-time AGC tracking with limited inter-station information exchange. Case studies on a reproducible simulated network with 20 stations and 600 chargers show that the proposed method improves ancillary service benefits while maintaining strong tracking performance and markedly improving the charging continuity, deadline compliance, and spatial load balance.
Peng et al. (Thu,) studied this question.