Wind powered smart charging facility for PHEVs

The growing global awareness for a pollution free environment coupled with lower cost and higher availability of smaller generating units (PV and wind) has elevated the interest in distributed generation. On the other hand, Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) present a promising and emerging technology of future transportation. But it should also be taken into account that the proliferation of PHEVs requires utilities to upgrade the distribution transformers to handle the additional load. Hence an intelligent integration of PHEVs and microgrids is needed to mitigate the issues of overloading on the distribution transformers. This paper proposes a charging station architecture with a small scale wind turbine as the primary source. Coordinated control strategy based on DC link voltage sensing is proposed to facilitate the operation of the charging facility in standalone and grid-connected mode. The proposed architecture and the control algorithm are validated through simulations using MATLAB/SIMULINK toolbox.