Strategies for Charging Electric Vehicles in the Electricity Market

This paper analyses different charging strategies for a fleet of electric vehicles. Along with increasing the realism of the strategies, the opportunity for acting on the regulating market is also included. We test the value of a vehicle owner that can choose when and how to charge; by presenting a model of four alternative charging strategies. We think of them as increasing in sophistication from dumb via delayed to deterministic and stochastic model-based charging. We show that 29% of the total savings from ‘dumb’ are due to delayed charging and that substantial additional gains come charging optimally in response to predicted spot prices, and – in some settings – additional gains from using the up and down regulating prices. Particularly, strategies are chosen from uncontrolled charging through deterministic optimization, to modelling the charging and bidding problem with stochastic programming. We show that all vehicle owners will benefit from acting more intelligently on the energy market. Furthermore, the high value of the stochastic solution shows that, in case the regulating price differs from the expected, the solution to the deterministic problem becomes infeasible.