Flexible local load controller for fast electric vehicle charging station supplemented with flywheel energy storage system

Abstract

Electric vehicle charging infrastructure is hitting the stage where its impact on performance and operation of power systems becomes more and more pronounced. Aiming to utilize the existing power distribution infrastructure and delay its expansion, an approach that includes installation of dedicated flywheel energy storage system (FESS) within the charging station and compensating some of the adverse effects of high power charging is explored in this paper. Although sharing some similarities with vehicle to grid (V2G) technology, the principal advantage of this strategy is the fact that many types of ancillary services can be provided to the grid without affecting the charging patterns of EV batteries, thus prolonging their lifetime and increasing the drivers' comfort level at the same time. Additionally, since the strategy is designed with a distributed bus signaling (DBS) method, it enables the operation without dedicated communication technologies, while allowing easy expandability and inherent plug and play functionality. This paper focuses on a near-future scenario with a high number of fast charging stations spread across the power system that impact the systems real time regulation capability. As a demonstrative example, a particular system-level control algorithm has been tailored towards to specific configuration of the fast charging station used in this paper, which includes FESS. Algorithm has been developed in Matlab/Simulink and compiled to real-time simulation platform dSPACE 1103. Corresponding simulation results have been reported in order to verify the validity of proposed approach.