A Triple State Time Variant Cost Function Unit Commitment with Significant Vehicle to Grid Penetration

Hastening the power industry toward smart operation juxtaposed with the unrivaled restructuring and privatization agendas, some of the ubiquitous smart grid advantages are glanced more and more. Recently, the vehicle to grid (V2G) technology, as one of these beneficial aspects, has found a worldwide attention due to its important advantages. The V2G technology can raise the system operation efficiency, if well committed. Unit commitment (UC) is an operation problem to find the optimal schedule of generation units. In a typical UC problem, the generation units have two operational states, producing power or not, while a V2G may have an additional state i.e. consuming power due to its capability of having bi-directional power flow. In this work, this feature is modeled by the third state i.e. -1 for V2G power consumption. In addition, this work considers different cost function coefficients for different time intervals. The binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) method is used to solve this sophisticated problem. The proposed methodology is justified through two dimensionally different case studies. What makes the results particularly interesting is that when V2Gs are taken into account, the total operation cost of the system decreases and also the V2G owners can obtain considerable profits.