Quantifying the Effects of Communication Network Performance in Vehicle-to-Grid Frequency Regulation Services

Abstract

Recent advances in communication systems and the proliferation of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) hold a promise to support power systems operations with vehicle-togrid (V2G) applications. However, such ancillary services have tight communication requirements (low-latency, high reliability) as the aggregated PEVs need to respond to market signals within seconds and bad communication system performance lead to financial losses. In this paper, we consider a frequency regulation application in which PEVs are charged and discharged according to actual market signals. We assume that a market operator sends signals through 4G/LTE network to an aggregator located at a parking lot, who, as a next step, delivers data packets to electric vehicle supply equipments (EVSEs) via a local Wi-Fi network. In the final phase, each EVSE communicates with PEV battery management unit via power line communications. By adopting communication delay and packet loss profiles from measurement and simulation studies, we examine the impacts of communication system performance on V2G performance. The results show that packet losses significantly lowers precision score, while there is a need for faster networks if multiple aggregators participate at the same time.