Performance evaluation of a multi-standard fast charging station for electric vehicles

Electric vehicles (EVs) have been considered as a feasible solution to deal with the high fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by conventional vehicles. However, long charging times and drivers' range anxiety are the main disadvantages of EVs. A key factor that is expected to mitigate these problems and facilitate the wide adoption of EVs will be the effective operation of fast charging stations (FCSs). In this paper, the operation of a FCS is evaluated, in terms of operator's profits and customers' waiting time in the queue. The FCS contains both dc and ac outlets that provide high power levels, while the various EV models are classified by their battery size and the fast charging option they use (dc or ac). The operator's daily profits and the queue waiting time are initially computed by considering that the EVs recharge under a flat-rate pricing policy. In order to avoid a long queue build-up at the FCS, a new pricing policy is then proposed. The intuition behind the scheduled pricing policy is that users are deterred to charge more than an arranged energy threshold, thus reducing the load and the waiting time at the FCS

Electrical Energy Savings through Efficient Cooperation of Urban Buildings: The Smart Community Case of Superblocks' in Barcelona

The major challenges that urban living has presented in recent years, as a result of the increasing population density, have triggered a discussion about the development of effective solutions that target the economic, social and environmental sustainability of urban areas. Environmental concerns have stressed the need for the development of innovative solutions for the effective and flexible utilization of renewable energy. In this article, we study the benefits of cooperation as an alternative solution to the optimum management of the energy generated, stored and consumed in urban buildings. The proposed cooperative energy management scheme is applied to a group of smart buildings of diverse energy consumption patterns that form a cluster and exchange energy, so that an optimum utilization of the energy generated by local renewables is achieved. We also demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the cooperative energy management system on a representative Superblock of Barcelona, since the idea of building cooperation is inspired by Barcelona's unique smart community planning model. The results indicate the significant reduction of power management cost (32.52 percent on average) and carbon emissions (62.88 percent on average) compared to the no power-exchange case, due to the optimal utilization of energy from renewable sources.This work has been co-funded by the projects CONNECT, an ECSEL Joint Undertaking (grant 737434), SEMIOTICS (grant 780315), Spot5G (grant TEC2017-87456-P), and SGR2017 (2017 SGR 00891).Scopu