Electric Vehicle Storage Management in Operating Reserve Auctions

Carsharing operators, which rent out electric vehicles for minutes or hours, lose money on idle vehicles. We develop a model that allows carsharing operators to offer the storage of these vehicles on operating reserve markets (market for quickly rampable back-up power sources that replace for instance failing power plants). We consider it a dispatch and pricing problem with the tradeoff between the payoffs of offering vehicles for rental and selling their storage. This is a problem of stochastic nature taking into account that people can rent electric vehicles at any time. To evaluate our model we tracked the location and status of 350 electric vehicles from the carsharing company Car2Go and simulated the dispatch in the Dutch market. This market needs to be redesigned for optimal use of storage. We make recommendations for the market redesign and show that carsharing operators can make substantial additional profits in operating reserve markets

Power Systems 2.0: Designing an Energy Information System for Microgrid Operation

In this paper we demonstrate the contribution of information systems towards a sustainable and reliable power supply. Following a Design Science approach we develop an information system for microgrid operation at a US army base. Microgrids enable an improved integration of distributed renewable energy sources and increase the robustness of the overall power grid. The microgrid in this study contains extensive photovoltaic generation, the energy demand of the base, as well as energy storage. The information system we design controls and optimizes microgrid operations under uncertainty, as well as physical and organizational constraints. Using real-world data to evaluate the system, we show that it substantially increases the amount of clean photovoltaic energy that can be generated while simultaneously decreasing energy costs of the base. Thereby, we are able to improve the ecological and economic efficiency of the microgrid