Optimizing electric vehicles charging cost for frequency regulation support in a smart grid

In addition to being a clean and environmentally friendly means of transportation, Electric Vehicles (EVs) can also help support the power grid through the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) system. If EVs charging and discharging is managed properly, V2G systems can support many services such as peak load leveling, demand response, renewable energy integration and various ancillary services. Ancillary services support such as frequency regulation is a very costly process, which is conventionally done through spinning, non-spinning reserves, back up generators, etc. EV batteries are considered as clean and reliable sources to support frequency regulation. However, the charging/discharging process should be optimized to maximize the benefit for both the EV owners and the utility. In this paper, we develop and solve an optimization problem that minimizes the cost of charging and discharging EVs while supporting frequency regulation. Our optimization problem takes real-time pricing, battery wear and other parameters into account to generate the optimum solutions for individual time slots. We formulate and solve the problem using mixed integer linear programming to minimize the cost of providing this service.