Randomized PHEV Charging Under Distribution Grid Constraints

Plug-in Hybrid Electrical Vehicles (PHEV) are promising to improve energy efficiency and environment friendliness. However, without proper control, their charging will cause harmful impact on the power distribution grid, including load congestion and voltage drop. Instead of using centralized optimization which may need accurate predictions on key parameters, in this paper, a new decentralized random access framework is introduced to schedule the PHEV charging. The proposed distributed solution does not need accurate predictions and can be executed online. Simulation on a semi-urban residential medium voltage grid shows that our algorithm can effectively provide demand response to protect the distribution grid from bus congestion and voltage drop, and also improve its efficiency. Most importantly, this algorithm is simple to deploy.