World Electric Vehicle Journal Vol.

4 - ISSN 2032-6653 - © 2010 WEVA Page000809

EVS 25
Shenzhen, China, Nov 5-9, 2010

Modelling, Evaluation and Optimization of

Vehicle-to-Grid Operation
Shuang Gao, K. T. Chau, C. C. Chan and Diyun Wu
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, sgao@eee.hku.hk

Abstract
This paper describes a simulation model of PHEV integration with the grid. This model provides

primary PHEV charging and discharging scenarios based on the general PHEV owner behaviors

and the typical PHEV charging circuitry configuration. Initially, the uncontrolled PHEV charging

scenarios are performed to evaluate the impact of the PHEV loading on the distribution grid

operation. The night charging scenario is chosen for detailed analysis and the load flow is used to

calculate the power distribution and loss on the 33-bus test power network. The results indicate the

inadequacy of current power capacity to meet the growing electricity demand from PHEVs. A

simple control method of off-peak charging is performed to show the improvement in voltage

levelling and line loading. Therefore, the appropriate control scheme should be derived for

regulating the PHEV charging and discharging. An optimal algorithm is proposed for utilizing the

PHEV charging and discharging power in a distribution system to minimize the total real power

loss. During charging period, the power rate of individual battery charging is coordinated

according to the optimal objective and constraints of charger, battery and power grid. Compared to

the uncontrolled PHEV charging results, the optimal algorithm can achieve the maximum loss

reduction for each charging scenario. Moreover, voltage drop at each node is limited in a tolerable

range while the tightened branch current restrictions are satisfied.

Keywords: “PHEV”, “power loss minimization”, “optimal charging”, “distribution grid”

for environmental pollution and the demand

1 Introduction for renewable energy [1-4] contribute to
The rise in fossil fuel prices, growing concern increasing interest in electric vehicles (EVs)

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World Electric Vehicle Journal Vol. 4 - ISSN 2032-6653 - © 2010 WEVA
technology in recent years. Among them, the
plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV) is considered as a
promising solution for electrification of
transportation sector and being introduced
rapidly into the market by the mainstream
automobile manufacturers [5-6]. The PHEV
can be charged to store the energy by
connection to electricity outlet, and have the
capability to supply the energy storage to grid
by discharging the battery [7-9]. The existing
studies provide comprehensive topologies for
bi-directional EV battery chargers [10]. The
aggregation of PHEVs plugged in the
distribution grid becomes an electric load in
the short term. Numerous studies have
examined the issue of PHEV penetration
degree and electrical consumption over the
next few years, which indicated that the
penetration of PHEVs in 13 US regions would
be up to 25% by 2020 [11]. Without controlled
charging, large-scale PHEV deployment could
challenge the accommodation ability of the
current power supply adequacy, thus requiring
the construction of new power plants. However,
the integration of PHEV into power network
also promises many advantages by providing
ancillary grid support services or storage for
renewable generation expansion. Given the
potential for a controllable large-scale load or
resource, it is important to understand the
impact of growing PHEVs on the grid.
The aggregation of a sizable number of the
PHEVs may constitute a significant load on
the current power network. Additional PHEV
loading increases the node voltage drop which
contributes to the incremental power losses.
This paper assesses the impact of PHEV
charging on the grid operation in terms of
power losses and voltage deviations by
building the simulation model of the
distribution grid with the PHEV penetration
over certain degree. The results manifest the
challenge of distribution system operation
even though the PHEVs are charged in the
off-peak time. It should cause a high risk of
EVS25 World Battery, Hybrid and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Symposium
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overload when the battery charging occurs
near the daily peak; therefore, proper
rescheduling of the grid operation is important
for the grid with PHEV integration. In this
paper, an optimal control method for PHEV
charging is proposed to minimize the power
losses and enhance power quality as well. The
further deployment of V2G power for
improving the system operation is also
discussed.
2 Impact of Growing PHEV
Loading
The purpose of the PHEV integration model is
to estimate the impact of increasing PHEV
charging load on the distribution grid. The
proposed modeling method is described in
detail and three PHEV charging scenarios are
considered. The night charging is chosen to
calculate the hour-by-hour loading profile and
power loss.
2.1 Formulation of PHEV charging
scenarios
A known number of PHEVs are deployed on
the 33-bus radial distribution grid. The PHEV
loads are randomly distributed throughout the
selected nodes in the network. The first vehicle
charging case in this study is the uncontrolled
charging. The overall PHEV penetration is less
than 10% of total electricity consumption in
the distribution system. The PHEVs are mainly
charged at public charging stations and the
charging points for vehicle owners who live in
apartment complexes or higher density urban
dwellings where the parking lots have
recharging infrastructure installed. That is,
PHEV loads are more likely to be clustered in
certain sites increasing the production for
negative distribution system impacts. Thus, we
assume that the PHEV load demand assembles
at several nodes in the grid as shown in Fig.1.
In this case, vehicle owners charge their
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World Electric Vehicle Journal Vol. 4 - ISSN 2032-6653 - © 2010 WEVA
vehicles at home when they come back from
the work place [12]. The PHEV begins
charging as soon as it is plugged in the
distribution grid at a constant power input until
the battery is fully charged. The battery pack
holds 9kWh of energy and 90% efficiency for
on-board/off-board charger [13-15]. All
PHEVs are plugged into a 220V/13A, the
power rating of Hong Kong residential
electricity outlet, operating at a maximum
charging rate of 2.8kW. Although this is the
low charging mode for common household
circuit, the PHEV can be fully charged within
4 hours. The parameters set for formulating the
PHEV charging load is listed in Table 1.
The PHEVs are expected to be fully charged at
their home location and drive to their work
places in the morning. The number of the
PHEVs charged at certain time is varied by a
normal distribution function. The standard
deviation is determined in such a way that
all the PHEVs are fully charged by the end of
the charging period, namely 3:00 am. Since the
starting point of uncontrolled PHEV charging
is normally coincident with the high load
demand in the early evening. The off-peak
charging scenario is derived to delay the
PHEV charging in order to shift it to the
off-peak period.
Table 1: Parameters for the PHEV fleets
Parameters Value
Average battery capacity 9.4
Vehicle mass 1488
All-electric range 60
Average energy use over 59 and
drive cycle 23
CD-mode energy use 0.183
Expected number of PHEV 600
2.2 Power grid with
integration
In this 33-bus radial distribution system, bus
no.1 is considered as the slack where electric
power is injected. Six buses are selected to
EVS25 World Battery, Hybrid and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Symposium
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connect the PHEVs with the grid. The
structure of the test system is shown in Fig. 1.
Each bus may have multiple of PHEVs
attached and the aggregator is responsible for
dispatching the available power according to
the control scheme. A given number of PHEVs
are randomly distributed throughout the
selected nodes. In the uncontrolled case all
PHEVs are assumed to charge at the same rate
and consume the same amount of energy. The
PHEV charging load is formulated depending
on the given scale of PHEV aggregation, the
charging rate and the battery energy capacity.
The extra PHEV loads are added to the base
load at each node as shown in Fig. 2 (a). In
reality, specific areas have a higher
concentration of PHEVs. So in this case, all
the PHEVs are assumed to be distributed at the
six nodes chosen randomly, but the numbers of
the PHEV aggregation at each node are not
evenly through the nodes.
Figure 1: one-line diagram of the proposed
Unit distribution grid
kWh
kg
2.2 Effects of PHEV charging
The load flow calculation is performed to
km
evaluate the impact of this additional load. The
Wh/km
hourly voltage profile and the total power loss
km/l
are illustrated in Fig 2 (b) and (c). In both of
kWh/km
the figure, the time step with the heaviest load
vehicles
demand is selected so that the maximum
voltage drop and line losses can be manifested.
PHEV
Although the off-peak control scheme is
simply designed to regulate the PHEV
charging, the voltage drop and the line loading
can be effectively reduced.
3
World Electric Vehicle Journal Vol. 4 - ISSN 2032-6653 - © 2010 WEVA Page000812

charging demand may be insufficient.

Therefore, the appropriate control scheme is
Bus load (MW)

necessary to be applied onto the power grid

with a high level penetration of PHEVs.

(a)

(a)
1
Base load
Uncontrolled
0.95 Off peak
(b)
0.9
Line loss (kW)

0.85
0 5 10 15 20 25
Hour

(b)
Figure 3: Hourly simulation results for
uncontrolled and off-peak scenarios: (a) daily load
profile with and without PHEVs; (b) minimum
(c) voltage profile
Figure 2: Simulation results of 33-bus test network
for uncontrolled and off-peak charging scenario. (a)
load pattern; (b) bus voltage; (c) line losses
3 Control Framework for V2G

In Fig. 3 (a) the base load represents the daily

electricity demand pattern in Hong Kong and
the PHEV charging load is added. The daily
uncontrolled charging profile ramps up rapidly
from 7 pm to 9 pm at the end of the normal
workday and reaches the most charging
capacity in the mid or late evening. There is an
clear increase of daily peak demand due to the
integration of PHEVs. The off-peak charging
scheme can offset the peak load demand
caused by PHEVs. Thus the voltage drop can
be curtailed within the limited range. It could
decrease supply adequacy and indicate the
ability to accommodate the extra PHEV
Operation
The integration of PHEV fleet into the power
grid provides the opportunity to utilize the
energy stored in the vehicle batteries as the
power supply. The V2G is defined as the
power that vehicle fleet feed back to the grid
with appropriate connection. The upgrading
the existing power grid to smart grid opens
new opportunities for V2G implementation.
The smart sensor and metering devices, the
two-way communication network and the
multi-layer control structure can be necessarily
used for realizing V2G operation. The
aggregator which supervises the charging and

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discharging of PHEVs has to interact with
power system operators at different levels.
A V2G framework to effectively integrate the
aggregated PHEVs into grid is proposed and
depicted in Fig. 3. The construction of
information layer is also described in the
diagram to show the groups of data and signals
for V2G control. Based on the conceptual
framework derived for V2G implementation, a
hierarchical structure with the controllable
electric devices is constructed in the real
power network.

Figure 4: Hierarchical architecture of the V2G control network

is given by:
4 Optimal Control Algorithm of
tmax lmax
min Ploss min Rl I l 2 (t ) (1)
Coordinated Charging t 1 l 1

In order to reduce the negative effect of PHEV
load, optimal charging method should be used
to reduce the power loss and voltage drop
[16-18].
4.1 Optimal algorithm
minimizing power losses
The objective of the coordinated charging
scheme is to minimize power losses.
Sequential quadratic programming method
where R l and I l is the resistance and current on
the transmission line, and the P loss represents
the total power loss. This function is subject to
the constraints of charging rate, battery state
and power system operation limitations.
for 1. System power balance. Power supplied from
the generators must satisfy the load demand,
the power of charging for PHEVs and the
system losses as expressed by:
NG NV

[19-20] is used to calculate the optimal active PGi (t ) Pload (t ) PVi (t ) Ploss (t ) (2)
i 1 i 1
power for charging the PHEVs in the
constrained parking lots. Therefore, the where N G is the total number of the generators
objective function for power loss optimization in the system including the small-size

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World Electric Vehicle Journal Vol. 4 - ISSN 2032-6653 - © 2010 WEVA
distribution generators and limited capacity of
discharging PHEVs, and N V is the number of
PHEVs connected to the grid at time t.
2. Generation limits. Each generation resource
in a certain bus has a generation range, which
is defined as:
Pi min PGi (t ) Pi max
Where P min and P max are the upper and lower
boundaries of power output for each generator
3. Transmission line limits. In the power flow
calculation, the branch power flow limit
should be satisfied. It can be represented by
current limits for each line:
max
I ij I ij
where I ij is the current of the branch between
bus “i” and ‘j”.
4. The initial SOC of PHEV load. The state of
charge (SOC) of the batteries at the beginning
of the charging period must be considered in
the optimal algorithm as each PHEV parked in
the recharging place has some energy stored in
the battery.
nVi
EVi ,int SOCVi ,k EVi ,k nVi EVi ,avg
k 1
where E Vi,int is the initial battery energy of
PHEV aggregation, n Vi is the number of
PHEVs aggregated at each node, SOC Vi,k is the
initial SOC of each PHEV battery pack, E Vi,k is
the battery storage capacity of each PHEV, and
E Vi,avg is the mean value of the PHEV initial
SOC predetermined in accordance with the
characteristic of vehicle on-board battery pack.
5. Total energy for PHEV charging. It is
expressed as:
t max
PVi (t )T EVi ,max EVi ,int
t 1
where T is the time interval and E Vi,max is the
maximal amount of energy to recharge the
vehicles at the end of the charging period,
indicating the battery energy storage capacity
of each PHEV aggregation, because the
vehicles must be fully charged before the
departure from the parking lots.
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6. The limit of PHEV charging rate. The PHEV
battery charging power regulated by the
on-board/off-board charger should be
restricted in a reasonable range [21], taking
into consideration of the recharging time and
the availability of grid power.
(3) PVimin PVi PVimax (7)
where P Vi,min is the minimal recharging rate,
and the P Vi,max is the continuous power rating
on name plate of an electricity outlet.
In the algorithm, the power flow analysis is
firstly implemented using the input data of the
33-bus system with PHEV charging load. The
results of the initial iterative calculation are
(4)
used for the optimal scheduling of the
generation resources and load demands. While
the potential use for PHEVs is as distributed
electrical sources, the first case only considers
the loading characteristics. The ratio of the
PHEV charging demand at the six nodes is
defined from the random number generator.
The charging rate of each PHEV aggregation is
decided by optimal control algorithm and
varying over the time. Two of them are
(5)
depicted in the Fig. 5, which are the nearest
and farthest points from the main generation
unit.
300
At bus no. 6
250 At bus no. 27
200
150
100
50
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
PHEV charging hour
(6)
Figure 5: The charging power of the PHEVs
4.2 Simulation results for optimal
charging scenario
The PHEV charging is dispatched in the period
that is the same with the uncontrolled charging.
As shown in Fig. 3, the daily load demand
stays the same pattern. Fig. 6 shows the
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World Electric Vehicle Journal Vol. 4 - ISSN 2032-6653 - © 2010 WEVA
additional PHEV charging load that is
appended onto the base load. Under the
optimal control scheme, the PHEV charging
loads are shifted to match the periods of
minimum demand. The power losses are
reduced by the regulation of PHEV charging
load as shown in Fig. 7.
Figure 6: PHEV charging load with and without
the optimal regulation
Figure 7: Total losses of the different scenarios
during the charging period
Figure 8: Minimum voltage profile on a daily basis
The comparison of the voltage profile in
optimal charging and the uncontrolled
charging scenarios is illustrated in Fig. 8,
where the minimum bus voltage at each time
step is selected. The proposed optimal
charging scheme reduces the voltage deviation
EVS25 World Battery, Hybrid and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Symposium
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below 10% of the distribution nominal voltage
(the standard limit set in EN50160 [22]). This
extra load can be accommodated by the current
power system without serious augment in the
power losses and voltage drop.
5 Improved Algorithmic Model
for V2G Operation
The management of charging PHEVs is the
mere concern in the above algorithm while the
PHEV aggregation can act as both controllable
load and resource for participating in the
power system planning. The ability of PHEV
discharging into grid can also be evaluated by
using this simulation model and algorithm. It
should be noted that even a small size of
PHEV discharging aggregation can provide
peaking and peak reserve capacity, especially
during the peak demands. A V2G ratio is
introduced to assess the battery capacity that
can be used for power supply compared to the
demand for battery charging. The V2G ratio is
expressed by:
rV 2G EV 2G E EV rV 2G (8)
where r V2G is the ratio of energy for power
supply to the energy required for charging
PHEVs.
In the 33-bus system simulation with V2G
capability, 20% of PHEV charging amount in
previous scenarios is assumed to provide
discharge capacity while the PHEV fleets are
placed in the same nodes as the above case.
The algorithm can also be adopted to schedule
a very limit PHEV discharging capacity to
shave the peak demand in the daytime. The
new boundary must be set in the constraints to
manifest the actual V2G capacity.
Although the available discharging energy is
small, the results in Fig. 9 show a substantial
reduction of power loss and the improvement
of voltage stability. The V2G energy is
supplied to make sure the voltage drop is
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World Electric Vehicle Journal Vol. 4 - ISSN 2032-6653 - © 2010 WEVA
within 10%, which can meet the voltage
standard defined in EN50160 [16], and
improve the grid-buffering capability of the
PHEV aggregation.
(a)
(b)
(c)
Figure 9: 24-hour simulation results for the
improved V2G operation scheme: (a) daily load
profile with and without PHEVs; (b) minimum
voltage profile; (c) total power losses
6 Conclusion
In this paper, a combined model of PHEV and
power network is built to assess the impact of
increasing PHEVs on the existing distribution
grid. The simulation results indicate that the
deployment of PHEVs in a distribution
network will have diverse effects on power
loss and node voltage drop, which indicating
EVS25 World Battery, Hybrid and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Symposium
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the necessity of power regulation method. A
hierarchical structure of the V2G framework is
thereby derived to perform the optimal control
scheme. Both the characteristics of PHEV and
power system model are included in the
optimal control algorithm to demonstrate the
realistic situation for V2G operation. By the
comparison to the uncontrollable charging case,
the optimal method can efficiently minimize
the total real power loss, and maintain the bus
voltage. This PHEV model and optimal
charging scheme paves the way to a practical
vehicle-to-grid operation, and proves the V2G
operation can allow the high level penetration
of PHEVs in the existing grid and may be able
to support the system operation.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant (Project no.
201007176031) from the HKU SPACE Research
Fund and the Committee on Research and
Conference Grants of University of Hong Kong.
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EVS25 World Battery, Hybrid and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle Symposium 9