Orderly Charging Control of Electric Vehicles: A Smart Meter-Based Approach

The charging load of electric vehicles (EV) is one of the most rapidly increasing loads in current power distribution systems. It may cause distribution transformer/feeder overload without proper coordination or control, especially in residential area where household load and EV charging load are sharing transformer capacity. Existing smart meter-based orderly charging control (OCC) approaches commonly require costly but unreliable communication schemes to control EV charging behavior. In this work, a smart meter-based distributed controller is designed to establish a meter-to-EV communication interface with low cost and enhanced reliability, based on the state-of-the-art charging standard. An event-driven OCC algorithm is developed, and then, deployed in the data hub (concentrator) of the AMI with an easy-to-implement optimization formulation. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated using a numerical case study and a practical field test in Hangzhou, China. Both results indicate promising advantages of the proposed OCC approach in reducing the peak load of emerging EV charging demand by more than 30%.