Day-Ahead Optimal Bidding for a Retailer With Flexible Participation of Electric Vehicles

Abstract

The existing bidding models for retailers managing electric vehicles (EVs) in distribution-level day-ahead (DA) electricity markets have not fully addressed EVs’ temporal distribution, charging and discharging management, or bidding curves. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a DA optimal bidding model for a retailer with flexible participation of EVs. First, the investigating period for DA optimal bidding is modeled to cover the connecting periods of all EVs that may potentially impact the DA power demand prediction. Then, incentive mechanisms for charging and discharging are proposed to enable retailers to manage EVs under uncertain market prices and EV parameters while also considering the battery degradation cost and the preferences of EV users based on a social survey. The optimal charging model based on incentive mechanisms for charging-discharging helps EVs minimize their energy purchase costs under different price scenarios. Based on the minimum EV energy purchase cost, the optimal bidding model of a retailer aims to achieve the maximum bidding profit considering the conditional value at risk (CVaR), with the step bidding curves and the temporal differences for different time intervals considered. Simulations validate the proposed model under flexible incentive mechanism for charging and incentive mechanism for discharging participation of EVs.