Intelligent Participation of Electric Vehicles in Demand Response Programs

Demand Response (DR) has been proposed and implemented in recent years to enable the participation of active consumers in energy management. However, existing programs do not consider the characteristics and opportunities introduced by electric vehicles (EVs). EVs have more flexibility than traditional loads and can be used as battery energy storage systems if the vehicle-to-grid capability is available. The main contribution of this paper is the analysis of the EV user's point of view concerning different DR programs (implicit and explicit) as well as the EVs management considering different strategies. One of the most interesting strategies that have been proposed and tested is opportunity cost optimization, where the expected prices of the next days are considered. Some of the results show that DR programs with less cost are interesting for the users since also minimise the EV charging during the DR time operation. On the other hand, realtime pricing program is not interesting for the users since its performance is highly dependent on the market price.