Design of a Charging Station for Electric Vehicles Based on a Photovoltaic-Biodiesel Hybrid Renewable Energy System Combined with Battery Storage

Abstract

The rapid deployment of electric vehicles (EVs) in Jordan requires massive efforts to prepare the infrastructures that serve the transportation sector. The lack of EV charging stations is the major obstacle that faces EV drivers. Utilizing renewable energy in EV charging stations contributes to the spread of these stations. Renewable energy technologies are environmentally friendly as they mitigate greenhouse gases that cause the global warming phenomenon. In this paper, an EV charging station, based on a PV-biodiesel-battery hybrid system, is investigated. The importance of this article is to discuss the hybrid system of PV and waste vegetable oil (WVO) along with storage that applies the maximum reliability supply, having an environmentally friendly supply and achieving the lowest energy cost of charging. This station is designed based on renewable and WVO utilization. In fact, WVO, coming from restaurants, is exploited to produce electricity by a diesel generator through direct burning after converting it into biodiesel. The capacity of each station is 14 cars/day with a medium-speed charger of 7 kW. The system is simulated and optimized using iHOGA software where multiobjective optimization is applied to achieve the minimum net present cost (NPC) and CO2 emissions considering three cases, PV-diesel, PV-biodiesel, and PV-WVO, all with battery-hybrid system. These values for the EV charging station that uses the PV-biodiesel-battery hybrid system are 624408 € and 15.4 tons/year, respectively. The corresponding values are 781473 € and 15.14 tons/year and 615310 € and 18.84 tons/year for the systems that work with diesel and WVO, respectively, and energy cost is achieved in best solution to be 0.11 Euro/kWh. Simulation results show that the proposed technique led to enhanced operational efficiency in terms of both NPC and annual CO2 emissions.