Competitive Charging Station Pricing for Plug-in Electric Vehicles

This paper considers the problem of charging station pricing and plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) station selection. When a PEV needs to be charged, it selects a charging station by considering the charging prices, waiting times, and travel distances. Each charging station optimizes its charging price based on the prediction of the PEVs' charging station selection decisions and the other station's pricing decision, in order to maximize its profit. To obtain insights of such a highly coupled system, we consider a one-dimensional system with two competing charging stations and Poisson arriving PEVs. We propose a multi-leader-multi-follower Stackelberg game model, in which the charging stations (leaders) announce their charging prices in Stage I, and the PEVs (followers) make their charging station selections in Stage II. We show that there always exists a unique charging station selection equilibrium in Stage II, and such equilibrium depends on the charging stations' service capacities and the price difference between them. We then characterize the sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the pricing equilibrium in Stage I. We also develop a low complexity algorithm that efficiently computes the pricing equilibrium and the subgame perfect equilibrium of the two-stage Stackelberg game.Comment: 15 pages, 21 figure

PEV-based P-Q Control in Line Distribution Networks with High Requirement for Reactive Power Compensation

Abstract-While plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are expected to provide economic and environmental benefits to the transportation sector, they may also help the electric grid, both as a potential source of energy storage and as a means to improve power quality and reliability. In this paper, our focus is on the latter, where PEVs offer reactive power compensation using P-Q control at their charger inverters. In this regard, we develop a new optimization-based P-Q control strategy for PEV charging stations to be implemented in line distribution networks that are in great need of reactive power compensation, either because of serving large industrial loads or due to the inductive impact of distribution level wind turbines. Our design is based on a nonlinear power flow analysis, and the design objectives are to perform voltage regulation and demand response. Through various computer simulations, we assess our proposed PEV-based reactive power compensation and compare it with the case where no P-Q control is conducted at PEV charging stations