Communication-based Plug-In Hybrid Electrical Vehicle load management in the smart grid

New services and applications that employ the advances in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to the electrical power grid are rapidly emerging and consequently the traditional power grid is evolving into a smart grid. In the smart grid, communication among the supplier controlled generation units, utility administered transmission and distribution system and the consumer devices is providing new opportunities for improving the resilience and the efficiency of the grid. Resilience is a significant issue due to increasing demand, and in contrast, diminishing fossil fuels. Moreover, in the near future, resilience is expected to become a more significant concern especially due to the additional loads of the Plug-In Hybrid Electrical Vehicles (PHEVs). PHEVs are expected be widely adopted as passenger cars and as commercial vehicle fleets since they have low carbon emissions and low operating costs. On the other hand, their load on the power grid should be managed so that they do not cause failures. In this paper, we propose the Communication-based PHEV Load Management (Co-PLaM) scheme to control the load of the PHEVs. In our scheme, utilities provision a certain amount of energy for each distribution system based on the predicted supply level. The provisioned energy is communicated to the Substation Control Center (SCC) where each charging request is either accepted or rejected based on the utility set limits. Then, these decisions are sent to the smart charging stations through a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) that uses IEEE 802.11s. In this paper, we simulate the Co-PLaM scheme and also mathematically analyze the blocking probability of the system. We show the performance of WMN in terms of delivery ratio, delay and jitter. Furthermore, we provide the blocking results and show the required additional capacity to supply all the PHEV loads without causing grid failures.