Different charging infrastructures along with smart charging strategies for electric vehicles

Sulabh Sachan, Sanchari Deb, Sri Niwas Singh

Sustainable Cities and Society

The accelerating energy demand, growing concern regarding global warming and climate change has paved the path of electrification of the transport sector. Large scale adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) call for availability of sustainable and easily accessible charging infrastructure. The sporadic energy demand, different battery storage capacity and diverse penetrating patterns of electric vehicles have significantly raised the load elasticity on a power grid. Smart-grid environment promises to assist the addition of EVs into national grids by enabling both EV-charging and discharging (G2V and V2G) load. This will modify the load profile and reduce cost.This paper discusses comprehensively three basic infrastructures by which charging of EVs can be done. These infrastructures are studied and compared on the basis of some parameters. It has been found that distributed infrastructure shows best results for the charging of electric vehicles. The other two infrastructures prove costlier and increase power demand. Also, this paper examines three specific smart charging strategies and the impact of each strategy on the power system load profile and realization cost. Simulation results establish the superiority of smart charging over dumb charging.