Minimizing the Cost of PHEV Usage with Price Sensitive Charging Strategies

Abstract

Electric cars sales have been rising almost steadily over the past decade. Uncontrolled charging has recently emerged as the main detrimental factor to this otherwise environmentally friendly and paradigm shifting technology due to the incurred impact on the energy grid. In addition, people are usually hesitant in allowing their vehicles to be controlled by external units; therefore, controlled charging strategies that offer users the option to have some control over their vehicles seems to be a sensible choice moving towards a gasoline-free vehicles market. This work investigated two price-sensitive charging strategies that allowed users to control the charging of their vehicle in order to receive cost benefits. These strategies were of a parametric nature; thus, the analysis focused on providing useful rules of thumb to guide users in choosing the most suitable strategy and the relevant parameters according to their driving profiles. The results show that when driving less than 40 km/h on average and employing a price-sensitive charging strategy with the proposed optimized parameters, electric car users may obtain 30–40% of the running cost reduction.

Keywords

• EV charging
• energy price
• V2G