Investigating a large-scale PHEV/PEV parking deck in a smart grid environment

There is a need to address the potential problems caused by the emergence of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) within the next 20 years. The penetration of these vehicles into the marketplace poses a potential threat to the existing power grid. Adding a large number of PHEVs/PEVs into our society will create a large-scale aggregated load, as well as acting as a substantial energy resource. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of the integration of PHEVs/PEVs into the grid. First, we simulate the aggregated load pattern at a municipal PHEV/PEV parking deck, taking into account real world parking deck scenarios. Then we propose two smart charging programs to optimally allocate available power from the utility to a large number of PHEVs/PEVs at a municipal parking deck. In a smart grid environment, the proposed energy management programs can improve the stability and reliability of the power grid. We characterize the system performance and illustrate the potential improvement using several steady-state simulations. The simulation results provide a general overview of the impact of the proposed charging scenarios in terms of voltage profiles, peak demand, and charging cost.