Reducing the Curtailment of Photovoltaic Energy Production through Smart Electric Vehicle Charging

The current issues of climate change and air pollution are pushing the electricity sector to move towards the deployment of renewable energy sources. However, shifting from traditional to renewable energy resources like solar energy introduces new aspects and challenges. Weather dependency and the need for expensive storage infrastructure to cope with power fluctuations appear among the main aspects for effectively using solar energy. When storage cannot be used, in the presence of high diffusion of renewable energy it could be necessary to resort to energy curtailment in the peak hours of production. In this paper, we propose a methodology which helps the reduction of energy curtailment in the peak production hours of photovoltaic panels by controlling the charging power of electric vehicles connected to the grid without reaching the line loading limits and without exceeding the voltage magnitude limits in the nodes of the grid.