Smart Charging for Future Electric Vehicle Adoption in Office Areas and Flexibility Assessment

The integration of Photovoltaic (PV) systems with Electric Vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is growing, providing substantial benefits for the power grid and consumers. This paper proposes a model to assess the flexibility of various charging station adoption rates, exploring the application of EV smart charging and stationary battery management in an office area. It introduces a method for analyzing and simulating the time-dependent flexibility of EV demand, respecting the interdependencies among transaction parameters. The smart charging algorithms aim to minimize electricity costs and maximize PV self-consumption by evaluating unidirectional and bidirectional EV charging scenarios. The results demonstrate that incorporating vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology does not provide substantial improvements in achieving either objective compared to unidirectional charging. This is primarily due to factors such as EV availability and the costs associated with EV battery degradation. Given the workplace context with frequent daytime EV charging sessions, cost optimization proves to be more effective, as the optimal solution already achieves significant PV electricity self-consumption. Moreover, the potential for expanding the adoption of charging stations is analyzed due to the spare capacity of the existing transformer in the case study. Utilizing PV-based V2G optimization can further enhance the potential rate of adoption.