Uncertainty-observed virtual battery model for an electric vehicle parking lot enabling charger-sharing modelling

With the increase in the penetration of electric vehicles (EVs), there is a substantial need for a proper solution to meet the EVs’ charging demand. Due to the high investment cost of charging stations, the efficient operation of EV chargers is crucial. In this regard, in this paper, charger-sharing charging has been proposed to charge multiple EVs with a single EV charger. However, the existing models cannot model uncertain EV parking lots (EVPLs) with charger-sharing charging. In addition, most presented methods for uncertainty modelling of EVPLs are hard to implement in planning and large-scale system-level studies due to their complicated process and high computational burden. Therefore, in this paper, a virtual battery model has been proposed to model an EVPL enabling the charger-sharing charging modelling considering the uncertainty of arrival and departure. Our proposed approach models the EVPL as a battery with time-variant parameters obtained from EVs’ arrival and departure patterns. The proposed virtual battery model has been validated by comparing its performance on day-ahead (DA) and real-time (RT) power market participation of a 24-bus distribution system owning 12 EVPLs with the scenario-based method. The results show that its performance is similar to scenario-based uncertainty modelling while its computational burden is around 2.24% of the scenario-based model. In addition, the results indicate how by employing our proposed charging-sharing charging, EVPLs can dramatically increase their profit as a result of increasing the number of hosted EVs. In this context, a sufficiently high charging tariff motivates the EVPL owner to accommodate a substantial number of EVs. With only 200 EV chargers, the EVPL can host approximately 3200 EVs, given the characteristics of EVs and EV chargers outlined in the case study section. In contrast, the exclusive charger approach allows only 200 EVs to enter the parking facility and undergo charging.