Intelligent dispatch of Electric Vehicles performing vehicle-to-grid regulation

Electric vehicles (EVs) have the potential to provide valuable services to the utility grid through vehicle-to-grid (V2G). In order to take full advantage of V2G services aggregators are required to schedule and dispatch large groups of EVs in accordance to market rules. While there has been many studies looking at aggregator scheduling algorithms, there has been little work on algorithms for the actual dispatch. A commonly assumed method of incremental dispatch faces challenges of more expensive charging station costs and high communications overhead. In this work a dispatch algorithm for EVs performing unidirectional regulation is developed. This algorithm switches EV charging stations on and off using remote switches to meet the system regulation signal. The decisions on which EV to switch is made using charging priorities. This dispatch algorithm allows for less expensive infrastructure and a significant reduction in the required communications signals. Simulations on a group of 1000 EVs in the ERCOT system over a 24 hour period verify the performance of this dispatch algorithm against incremental dispatch algorithms.