Transactive energy control of electric energy storage to mitigate the impact of transportation electrification in distribution systems

Abstract

The adoption of Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) as a substitute to gasoline-based internal combustion engine vehicles represent a major change in the transportation sector. Typically, PEVs uses electricity to charge the on-board batteries instead of gasoline which is used in internal combustion engines. The main advantage of electrifying the transportation sector is to help lower fuel costs and reduce GreenHouse Gases (GHGs). Despite being an environmentally friendly means of transportation, the increased penetration of these electric vehicles may have negative impacts on the electrical power distribution system components (e.g. distribution primary feeders, transformers and secondary distribution lines), and as a result of these impacts, modification and upgrading of the distribution system components may be required. This can be achieved by increasing the distribution transformer sizes and adding new lines to the existing system, which may be considered an expensive solution. Several studies have been conducted to reduce the distribution system modification and upgrading costs, by coordinating the charging behavior of these vehicles either using centralized or decentralized control schemes. However, these methods limit the authority of vehicles’ owners regarding when to charge their vehicles which might be inconvenient for some. On the other hand, electric utilities offer different incentive programs for their customers to control their energy usage in order to reduce the probability of system failures and to increase the system reliability while decreasing the costs of infrastructure upgrade. However, most of these programs have not met the expected response from customers. In this dissertation, a new strategy is proposed to accomplish self-healing for the electric grid in order to reduce the negative impacts of PEVs charging demand. This novel technique is based on applying the Transactive Energy (TE) control concept. The proposed implementation of the TE concept in this work is based on the adoption of a multi-agent system at different levels of the electric power distribution system (e.g., residential homes, neighborhood areas, and the Distribution System Operator (DSO)). These agents work in a cooperative manner in order to reach a state of consensus between the electric power distribution system resources owned by the electric utility (e.g., distributed generation, community energy storage) and the resources owned by the homeowners (e.g., rooftop solar photovoltaic, home battery energy storage). Moreover, the multi-agent system will allow the customers to use their own resources in an optimal way that can gain the maximum benefits offered through different incentive programs. The results have shown that the negative impacts on the electric power distribution system due to the plug-in electric vehicles charging demand can be mitigated by applying the proposed TE control which requires at least 30% of customers to own controllable battery energy storage unit.