A review on integration of surging plug-in electric vehicles charging in energy-flexible buildings: Impacts analysis, collaborative management technologies, and future perspective

Abstract

Today’s plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) technology is one of the important ways to address the dependence of fossil energy and greenhouse gas emissions. With the explosive growth of the number of PEVs worldwide, surging PEVs charging has offered new opportunities and challenges for large amounts of existing buildings where more and more charging infrastructures have been added. By means of microgrid technology, energy-flexible buildings are nowadays integrated with multiple distributed energy sources, energy storages and various types of consumers, allowing the possibility of providing measures to mitigate the growing impact of surging PEVs charging demand and accommodate more PEVs in buildings. Collaborative management between PEVs and energy-flexible buildings is attracting more attention of energy professionals and provides incentives to make more efforts in developing more extensive and optimal control methods for the integrated building energy systems. However, there is little review focusing on the impact analysis and co-management technologies on PEVs charging in buildings. This paper firstly provides an overview of the literatures related to the impact of PEV charging on the building power demand profile and the associated distribution transformer performance as well as the key impact factors. Additionally, a comprehensive review and analysis are conducted on the state-of-the-art researches with regard to the co-management of PEVs and energy-flexible buildings with various energy flexibility sources for the co-benefits of the integrated building energy system. The further efforts needed for developing more applicable co-management methods for facilitating surging penetration of PEVs in buildings are also addressed.