Pricing of demand flexibility: Exploring the impact of Electric Vehicle customer diversity

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are a large, but also quite flexible load in the power system. Car parks constitute major future load clusters that need to coordinate charging requests from EVs according to local grid and supply conditions. For effective grid integration, it is necessary to understand how to influence the charging behavior of EV customers. A deadline differentiated pricing approach is employed to create incentives for EV customers to offer their load flexibility to the car park operator. We explore the effect of different utility diversity models and flexibility levels of EV customers in a car park scenario under consideration of local photovoltaic power generation. Our results indicate that a homogeneous customer utility model overestimates the car park operator profits by more than 17% as compared to a realistic heterogeneous model. Furthermore, we observe that the car park type, and thus the customer parking time also drives the attained profits.

I. Introduction

Electric vehicle charging is considered to be a crucial part of demand side flexibility in future smart grids [1]. In order to harness this flexibility potential, it is necessary to understand how to influence the charging behavior of electric vehicle (EV) users. Price incentives are one major mechanism to achieve this goal. Furthermore, understanding the habits and the economic behavior of EV owners makes it possible to optimize the utilization of local fluctuating renewable energy generators like photovoltaic (PV) systems.