Challenges in Future Competition of Electric Vehicle Charging Management and Solutions

In the foreseeable future, power grids will be managed largely with demand-side management (DSM) programs. With the growing population of electric vehicles (EVs) and the emergence of aggregators, DSM will surely introduce more intense competition to the markets. Since EV charging produces a large amount of time-flexible load in power systems, competition of its management could become a major game. This paper first formulates the game of EV charging management to describe this major form of the future DSM competition and then studies three challenges inherent in it: 1) inefficiency of Nash equilibria; 2) the game of chicken; and 3) cheating on private information. It is found that a central regulator is required to prevent these drawbacks. Solutions are proposed and a central governing procedure is also presented. The notion of the game of EV charging management is compatible with DSM programs that are able to schedule load flexibly over multiple time periods.