A robust design of electric vehicle frequency regulation service

Electric vehicles (EVs) have the potential to provide frequency regulation service to an independent system operator (ISO) by changing their real-time charging or discharging power according to an automatic generation control (AGC) signal. Recently, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued an order to ISOs to introduce a performance-based compensation paradigm. In this new compensation scheme, the ISOs make payments to the EVs for providing the frequency regulation capacity and the real-time dispatch when following the AGC signal. In this paper, we propose a robust EV frequency regulation (REF) algorithm to determine the hourly regulation capacity for each EV considering the randomness of the AGC signal. The proposed REF algorithm is based on a robust optimization problem formulation. It enables EVs to follow the random AGC signal reliably and to improve the EV frequency regulation revenue. Simulation results show that the proposed REF algorithm obtains a higher revenue compared with a benchmark algorithm from the literature under a performance-based compensation paradigm.