Flexible electric vehicle charging infrastructure (Flex-ChEV)

HEV chargers are expected to play a significant role in the total consumption of developed countries across the world. Besides, there is a global tendency to make power systems independent of fossil fuels by additional increases in the shares of renewable energy resources. Both of these effects tend to push the future power systems more and more towards the boundaries of safe operation. Today’s commercially available HEV chargers are not flexible and present significant disturbance sources for the grid. On the other hand, flexible chargers proposed in academic literature introduce several drawbacks mostly concerned with compromising the comfort level of vehicle owners and rapid degradation of HEV’s batteries. Therefore, preservation of power systems secure operation will require new interventions to increase the flexibility of HEV chargers in a cost-effective way.
Proposed project is focused on theoretical development and experimental verification of a new generation of fast HEV charging stations (CSs). Its principal functionality is to use dedicated ESS within the station to compensate the adverse effects caused by charging, as seen from the grid. Flexible fast CS will be an essential part of the future intelligent power systems as projected by the SG concept.