Optimal Day-ahead Operation for a PV-based Battery Swapping Station for Electric Vehicles

This paper tackles the problematic of the Plug-in Electric Vehicles (EVs) charging time. EVs usually have a limited driving range and need to charge frequently. Long charging times is one of the factors affecting the massive deployment of EVs. Although, DC fast charging can reduce the charging time significantly it results in many issues such as high battery degradation, also fast-charging stations need to be well designed to avoid long queues. Battery Swapping Stations (BSS) have been recently introduced in research to extremely reduce the charging time by swapping depleted batteries with fully charged ones. This paper presents a day-ahead optimal operation approach for a BSS dually powered from the electric grid and photovoltaic (PV) generation. The objective of the proposed approach is to maximize the BSS daily profit. Simulation results on a typical system prove the effectiveness of the proposed model. Finally, the impact of the PV generation capacity on the total profit is studied.