Smart Energy Management for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations with Renewable and Storage Integration

Electric vehicles, or EVs, have attracted much attention as eco-friendly, sustainable, and economically viable alternatives to the conventional internal combustion engine. They are central to addressing the increasing power demand challenges posed by the widespread adoption of EV charging stations. This paper explores an integrated photovoltaic (PV) systems and grid-powered charging stations for EVs. It introduces a novel control strategy designed for efficient energy management across various operating conditions. The strategy ensures coordinated operation to maximize energy efficiency, facilitating power sharing between Photovoltaic system and electricity grid. It allows for charging the electric vehicles directly through solar energy using MPPTs and falling back to grid power when PV energy is not available. Moreover, the system can supply excess PV power back to the grid during periods when it is not used for charging EVs. A feature that allows for reverse power flow facilitates the creation of an advanced smart-EV-grid concept, where electric vehicles can help reduce the load on the grid. This adaptive strategy can also be applied to traditional EV charging stations. Accommodation of various environmental conditions is done, and the design of power electronics converters used in the system is discussed with detailed modeling.