An intelligent energy management system to use parking lots as energy storage systems in smoothing short-term power fluctuations of renewable resources

Renewable energy sources (RES) provide significant environmental benefits, but are highly variable. Intelligent Parking Lots (IPL) can be utilized for smoothing renewable sources, thus reducing the need for large battery energy storage systems (BESS). However, the integration of intermittent RES with IPLs can be challenging. A proper energy management system (EMS) is need to optimize resource operations, reduce investment costs, and support higher penetrations of renewable energy. This paper presents a novel, heuristics-based EMS for an IPL coupled with wind turbines, photovoltaic systems, and expansion turbines, which avoids the need for BESS installation. Extensive simulation results for the case of the city of Isfahan show that the proposed EMS can smooth the output power of RES with a maximum variation of 5% during each 10-minute window. The method utilizes a small number of electric vehicles (EVs), and preserves the EVs battery lifetime by reducing the number of switching actions to an average of 0.2 for each EV, while satisfying the requested EV charge level.