Energy Management and Switching Control of PHEV Charging Stations in a Hybrid Smart Micro-Grid System
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electronics Article Energy Management and Switching Control of PHEV Charging Stations in a Hybrid Smart Micro-Grid System Tariq Kamal 1,2,* ID , Murat Karabacak 2, Syed Zulqadar Hassan 3 ID , Luis M. Fernández-Ramírez 1 ID , Muhammad Hussnain Riaz 4 ID , Muhammad Tanveer Riaz 3, Muhammad Abbas Khan 5 and Laiq Khan 6 1 Research Group in Electrical Technologies for Sustainable and Renewable Energy (PAIDI-TEP-023), Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Cadiz, Higher Polytechnic School of Algeciras, 11202 Algeciras (Cadiz), Spain; [email protected] 2 Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Sakarya University, 54050 Sakarya, Turkey; [email protected] 3 State Key Laboratory of Power Transmission Equipment and System Security and New Technology, School of Electrical Engineering, Chongqing University, 400044 Chongqing, China; [email protected] (S.Z.H.); [email protected] (M.T.R.) 4 Department of Electrical Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), 54792 Lahore, Pakistan; [email protected] 5 School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Changchun University of Science and Technology, Jilin 130022, China; [email protected] 6 Department of Electrical Engineering, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, 22060 Abbottabad, Pakistan; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +90-536-6375731 Received: 30 June 2018; Accepted: 20 August 2018; Published: 22 August 2018 Abstract: In this study, the energy management and switching control of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) in a hybrid smart micro-grid system was designed. The charging station in this research consists of real market PHEVs of different companies with different sizes. The rate of charging of PHEVs is managed via switching control to receive maximum benefits from renewable energy sources and reduce the consumption of electricity from the grid. To support the optimum utilization of sustainable power, charging time and network stability, seven scenarios were developed for different interaction among the proposed micro-grid system and PHEVs. The proposed hybrid smart micro-grid system consists of three renewable energy sources: photovoltaic (PV) array controlled via an intelligent fuzzy control maximum power point subsystem, a fuel cell stack and a microturbine set controlled by proportional integral differential/proportional integral subsystems. A hybrid energy storage system (super-capacitor, battery storage bank and hydrogen) and residential load are also included in the proposed architecture. The hybrid smart micro-grid system is checked in terms of voltage regulation, frequency deviation and total harmonic distortion (THD). It was found that these are in limits according to the international standards. The simulations verify the feasibility of the proposed system and fulfill the requirement of vehicle-to-grid and grid-to-vehicle operations in a smart grid environment. Keywords: plug-in hybrid electric vehicles; power management system; renewable energy sources; fuzzy; smart micro-grid Electronics 2018, 7, 156; doi:10.3390/electronics7090156 www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics Electronics 2018, 7, 156 2 of 17 1. Introduction Due to environmental concerns, depletion of fossil fuels, and advances in battery storage system, PHEVs have received a great amount of attention in the transportation sector [1,2]. These days, the world is looking towards renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and biomass to produce green energy. This green energy can be utilized by vehicles which are considered the main sources of environmental pollution. For example, 33.7% of greenhouse gas emissions were released by the transportation sector to the environment in 2012 [3]. Similarly, many American Lungs Association projects have stated [4] that the transportation sector is responsible for numerous lung diseases in America. Consequently, transport industries have introduced low emission vehicles such as PHEVs to directly address these problems. Therefore, each year, the purchase of PHEV increases worldwide. In the future, many Electric Vehicles (EVs) will be available in the transportation sector. For example, in 2015, approximately one million PHEVs were on US roads and 425,000 PHEVs were sold [5,6]. Furthermore, the Electric Power Research Institute have concluded that the PHEVs market share may reach up to 62% by 2050 in the US [7]. In the US, there are about 250 million registered vehicles. Using a moderate scenario since 2020, if the US vehicle fleet is 10% PHEVs and each vehicle uses 25 kWh battery capacity, the total 625 GWh would be a potential threat to today’s utility. The first electric vehicle was sold in Turkey in 2012 [8]. The electric vehicle market in Turkey is now growing very rapidly. According to the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology of Turkey, PHEVs will become the dominant vehicle choice on the road soon in Turkey. The increasing of PHEVs could burden the existing utility, which can result power losses at the customers end. Specifically, uncontrolled charging can cause grid stability problems on the local scale. Pakistan under Rahmat Group company has signed an agreement with two different Chinese companies to introduce EVs in Pakistan [9]. In the initial stage, the companies will introduce electric buses in the transport market, and in the second phase, a factory would be established at the complex in Jamshoro District of Sindh, Pakistan to produce electric cars and two-wheelers. According to the Energy Conservation Center belonging to the Ministry of Water and Power of Pakistan, the transport sector represents 28% of the total energy consumption in Pakistan. In the Pakistan scenario reported on 30 June 2015, the gap between electricity demand and supply was 5201 MW [10]. Currently, Pakistan is suffering from severe energy crisis, where urban and rural areas are not powered by proper electricity for 8–12 h and 18 h per day, respectively. There is a growing risk that the proliferation of EVs will trigger extreme surges in demand in Pakistan. This cannot be ignored, especially in Pakistan, and therefore, it is imperative to design a Charging Station (CS) setup powered from Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) coupled with smart charging strategies. Generally, vehicles are supposed to stay for at least 5 h per day in workplace [11]. Hence, making electric CS in a given workplace is beneficial, but the result would be some overloading issues particularly at the distribution level. Since the upgrading of transformer is an inflexible and a quite expensive option, this concern needs close concentration. Many authors in the literature have studied the effect of PHEVs charging on the distribution transformer [12–14]. In [12], the authors discussed the impact of PHEVs on distribution networks, but there is no analytical calculation in the paper. In [13], the authors analyzed the concerns due to the integration of PHEV on the residential distribution networks; however, in this study, the number of PHEVs per distribution transformer was limited to two. The authors concluded in [14] that the power management of the EV battery charge profile can help manage the loss of life of the distribution transformer. However, not much work has been done to charge the PHEVs from several RESs in a smart micro-grid. Although there are a few published papers about CSs for PHEV supplied by PV [15–18], they present certain limitations. For instance, the control of the PV system was not studied in [15–18]. Further, in all these papers, the authors designed the CSs based on the control of DC-link voltage, but the DC-link voltage has its own limitation and the authors did not consider the control of DC-link voltage when it reaches its maximum limit. Similarly, several authors focused on the residential distribution networks [19–21]. In [22,23], the authors described the overall peak demand due to the charging of EVs. They suggested that it should be managed effectively with proper load management. Smart control strategies that can Electronics 2018, 7, 156 3 of 17 open the paths for PV systems and EVs to integrate with the current power systems are suggested in [24]. The charging of PHEVs from PV system and its co-benefits are discussed in [25]. The study explains that PV provides an auspicious source of mid-day generation power for PHEVs while PHEVs perform as a dispatchable load. In another paper, the authors showed that high scale integration of EVs in the existing utility would be possible through management and scheduling [26]. The significance of EVs operating as an energy storage source is studied in [27]. There are three types of charging methods for PHEVs/EVs: Alternating Current (AC) level-1, AC level-2 and Direct Current (DC) level-3 charging. DC charging allows boosting the overall efficiency and providing the opportunity of fast charging [28–30]. The same concept is also supported in [31,32]. This sets it up appropriately to mix distributed renewable power generations such as PV, fuel cells, wind and other energy storage devices such as super-capacitor (SC) using the DC distribution bus (bus is an electrical node, which can be in DC or AC, where two or more electrical elements, such as loads, generators, etc., meet). Different DC charging station infrastructures have been presented by many authors [33,34]. The integration of PHEVs in municipal parking deck using smart energy management system is developed in [35]. The energy management system is there to control provision of energy to the vehicle battery chargers through real time monitoring to secure the maximum consumption of available power from sustainable energy and charging time. None of the papers reviewed provide an intelligent control, power electronics interface and power management of PHEVs in smart micro-grid system, where the primary energy source is controlled efficiently. None of those reviewed studies consider the real weather characteristics, but many researchers have developed charging station using virtual generated weather patterns. Moreover, the intelligent control of a renewable energy source is very important for a stable DC bus voltage.