Reactive power support of electrical vehicle charging station upgraded with flywheel energy storage system

Electrical vehicles (EVs) are presenting increasingly potential to replace the conventional fossil fuel based vehicles due to environmental friendly characteristic. Accordingly, Charging Stations (CS), as an intermediate between grid and large numbers of EVs, are supposed to have more critical influence on future smart transportation network. This paper explores an off-board charging station upgraded with flywheel energy storage system that could provide a reactive power support to the grid utility. A supervisory control scheme based on distributed bus signaling is proposed to coordinate the operation of each component in the system. As a result, the charging station could supply the reactive power support to the utility grid without compromising the charging algorithm and preserve the battery´s lifetime. Finally, the real-time simulation results based on dSPACE1006 verifies the proposed strategy.