Optimizing Electric Vehicle Charging Station Placement in Distribution Systems for Enhanced Power Grid Performance

The integration of electric vehicles in the transportation sector leads to lessening greenhouse gas emissions. It is mandatory to recharge electric vehicles as it depends on the battery storage system and due to the increase in electric vehicles models and numbers, there is a need for installing electric vehicles charging stations to meet new load needs that are considered as an overload. The unscheduled placement of electric vehicles charging stations harms the power grid and leads to poor power quality. This paper presents a proposed algorithm to optimally allocate electric vehicles charging stations in a distribution system. The allocation is based on minimizing the energy loss and maintaining the system voltage profile within limits. This is accomplished by considering a variable load profile and the charging/discharging profile of electric vehicles charging stations. To support system voltage, Vehicle-to-Grid mode is applied instead of using additional energy source. MATLAB/Simulink® software package and genetic algorithm are used to verify the proposed algorithm on a standard distribution network. The results prove the algorithm reliability as the system load is approximately doubled, and energy loss is barely slightly increased.