Potential Charging Techniques for Electric Vehicles Utilizing Photovoltaic Sources in Bangladesh

Most of the vehicles in Bangladesh are operated by fossil fuels such as petrol, octane, compressed natural gas, etc. This leads to the emission of a huge amount of greenhouse gases. Besides, most of these fuels are imported, which is a big challenge for energy security. Also, the prices of these fuels are increasing day by day. As a result, the maintenance cost of these vehicles also increased. The abovementioned problems can be solved using electric vehicles (EVs) instead of conventional vehicles. However, charging the batteries of EVs using the conventional grid-to-vehicle charging mechanism presents a huge burden on the national grid. Also, at present, there are no government laws regulating the charging of EVs using the national grid. As a result, there is enormous motivation to explore the possibility of charging EVs using alternative sources. This paper discusses electric vehicles and their charging techniques using photovoltaic (PV) sources. In the MATLAB/Simulink framework, two separate charging systems-the PV grid and the PV standalone-are investigated and simulated. The simulation results confirm the validity of the two charging techniques and show that about 3.45%-4.74% burden can be reduced from the national grid per day by charging the EVs via the two techniques.