Day-ahead Scheduling of Distribution Network with Electric Vehicle based Virtual Power Plant

The electric vehicle (EV) is a promising tool to provide flexibility to the distribution system operator (DSO). However, the massive quantities of EVs make it very challenging to harness their flexibility. One of the promising ways is to formulate the EV at charging station (CS) as a virtual power plant (VPP). Firstly, the EV flexibility is estimated with time and energy index, then the VPP is formulated with EV at the same CS. And then during day-ahead scale, the VPP will participate in the energy market, which enables DSO to utilize EV based VPP flexibilities and provide auxiliary services to improve system efficiency, such as peak-shaving and valley-filling. Simulation test demonstrated the effectives of the approach proposed in this paper. Comparison tests are conducted between the proposed approach and the uncoordinated charging, which demonstrated the approach employed in this paper can offer a tradeoff solution between the total cost and operation efficiency.