A Regional Time-of-Use Electricity Price Based Optimal Charging Strategy for Electrical Vehicles

With the popularization of electric vehicles (EVs), the out-of-order charging behaviors of large numbers of EVs will bring new challenges to the safe and economic operation of power systems. This paper studies an optimal charging strategy for EVs. For that a typical urban zone is divided into four regions, a regional time-of-use (RTOU) electricity price model is proposed to guide EVs when and where to charge considering spatial and temporal characteristics. In light of the elastic coefficient, the user response to the RTOU electricity price is analyzed, and also a bilayer optimization charging strategy including regional-layer and node-layer models is suggested to schedule the EVs. On the one hand, the regional layer model is designed to coordinate the EVs located in different time and space. On the other hand, the node layer model is built to schedule the EVs to charge in certain nodes. According to the simulations of an IEEE 33-bus distribution network, the performance of the proposed optimal charging strategy is verified. The results demonstrate that the proposed bilayer optimization strategy can effectively decrease the charging cost of users, mitigate the peak-valley load difference and the network loss. Besides, the RTOU electricity price shows better performance than the time-of-use (TOU) electricity price.