A heuristic charging strategy for real-time operation of PV-based charging station for electric vehicles

With the rapid development of EVs (electric vehicles), Stochastic EVs charging activities could greatly stress the distribution system causing performance degradations, peak load increases significantly and the grid may be overloaded. The charging demands of EVs would lead to several kinds of serious economic and environment issues. The integration of photovoltaic (PV) generation and EV charging infrastructure can effectively improve the performance, alleviate overloads of the distribution system, effectively improve efficiency of clean energy utilization and reduction of carbon emission. With consideration of users' demands and maximum local consumption of PV power, a charging rate feasible region based heuristic search algorithm is proposed to allocate the charging power optimally. With the charging rate feasible region of power battery, the searching region is limited and the searching time is saved. Real-time PV power, charging characteristics of power battery and characteristics of charging station are taken as the constraints. In order to improve the real-time performance, the event driven mechanism is used to realize the heuristic algorithm. case studies results suggest that the charging rate feasible region based heuristic charging strategy proposed can meet the users' demands and maximum local consumption of PV power.