Solar Charging of Electric Vehicles: Experimental Results

Abstract

Sales of electric vehicles, for commercial use and personal use, keep rising. In parallel of the development of the associated Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure (EVCI), systems for controlling the charging of EVs will have to be developed in order to reduce the impact of such a development on the power grid. In this paper, we present a supervision system that controls the electric vehicle charging of employees of CEA Cadarache research center. The EVCI of Cadarache, set up in 2016, is constituted of more than 80 22-kW AC charging points spread over 30 zones. This EVCI currently supplies more than 376 vehicles including taxis, service vehicles as well as employees’ vehicles. This infrastructure is one of the largest private EVCIs in the region. The supervision system controls electric vehicle (EV) charging in real-time according to two objectives: respecting user preferences, by fully charging the EV battery, and synchronizing the power consumption of a fraction of the EVCI, i.e., 24 charging points, with the power production of a solar photovoltaic plant. This paper details the supervision system that is used to carry out these experiments and presents experimental results. These results show that it is technically feasible to increase (up to 60 percentage points) the self-production ratio while satisfying EV users.

Keywords

• electric vehicles (EVs)
• photovoltaic (PV) production
• smart charging
• planning algorithm
• field test
• self-production