Grid frequency support by single-phase electric vehicles: Fast primary control enhanced by a stabilizer algorithm

Electric vehicles are growing in popularity as a zero emission and efficient mode of transport against traditional internal combustion engine-based vehicles. Considerable as flexible distributed energy storage systems, by adjusting the battery charging process they can potentially provide different ancillary services for supporting the power grid. This paper presents modeling and analysis of the benefits of primary frequency regulation by electric vehicles in a microgrid. An innovative control logic algorithm is introduced, with the purpose of curtailing the number of current set-point variations that the battery needs to perform during the regulation process. It is shown that, compared to traditional droop-control approaches, the proposed solution assures same effects in terms of frequency containment, by employing a considerably lower number of variations of battery current set-point. The modeled low voltage microgrid is built to reproduce a real configuration of the experimental facility SYSLAB-PowerLabDK. Root-mean-square simulation studies have been carried out in DIgSILENT PowerFactory environment for the validation of the controller.