Charging and Storage Infrastructure Design for Electric Vehicles

Abstract

Ushered by recent developments in various areas of science and technology, modern energy systems are going to be an inevitable part of our societies. Smart grids are one of these modern systems that have attracted many research activities in recent years. Before utilizing the next generation of smart grids, we should have a comprehensive understanding of the interdependent energy networks and processes. Next-generation energy systems networks cannot be effectively designed, analyzed, and controlled in isolation from the social, economic, sensing, and control contexts in which they operate. In this article, we present a novel framework to support charging and storage infrastructure design for electric vehicles. We develop coordinated clustering techniques to work with network models of urban environments to aid in placement of charging stations for an electrical vehicle deployment scenario. Furthermore, we evaluate the network before and after the deployment of charging stations, to recommend the installation of appropriate storage units to overcome the extra load imposed on the network by the charging stations. We demonstrate the multiple factors that can be simultaneously leveraged in our framework to achieve practical urban deployment. Our ultimate goal is to help realize sustainable energy system management in urban electrical infrastructure by modeling and analyzing networks of interactions between electric systems and urban populations.