Optimal coordination of electric vehicle charging and photovoltaic power curtailment in unbalanced low voltage networks: An experimental case

Abstract

This study introduces a quadratic programming-based optimisation method to coordinate electric vehicle (EV) charging and photovoltaic (PV) curtailment in unbalanced low voltage (LV) networks. The proposed model is defined as a convex model that guarantees the optimal global solution of the problem avoiding the complexity of non-linear models and surpassing the limitations of local solutions derived from meta-heuristics algorithms reported in the literature. The coordination is carried out through a centralised controller installed at the header of the LV feeder. The objective of the proposed strategy is to minimise the power curtailment of all PV systems and maximise the power delivered to all EVs by optimising at every time step a suitable setpoint for the PV units and the charging rate of each EV connected without surpassing network constraints. A new energy-boundary model is also proposed to meet the energy requirements of all EVs, which is based on a recurrent function that depends on the arrival-and-desired energy states of the vehicle to compute its charging trajectory optimally. The effectiveness of the proposed coordination strategy was successfully proven through three scenarios in a laboratory environment, making use of two commercial EVs and a PV inverter in a Power Hardware-in-the-Loop setup.