Enhancing frequency regulation coverage for electric vehicles in a smart grid environment

Abstract

Millions of Electric vehicles (EVs) are expected to be deployed across North America in the coming few years. EVs can serve dual purpose if they are properly managed and controlled, they can serve as a clean transportation medium and they can also provide power storage and ancillary services to the smart grid when they are plugged-in. One of the main important ancillary services that EVs are capable of providing to smart grids is frequency regulation, which is the mean of controlling frequency oscillations. EVs can participate in this operation by charging their batteries from the grid during frequency regulation-down and by discharging their batteries from the grid during frequency regulation-up. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to maximize the number of EVs participating in the frequency regulation market. Maximizing the number of EVs participating in the regulation process depends very much on the number of EVs that can hear the call for frequency regulation at that moment of time. Our mechanism increases the throughput and decreases the delay of EVs that are acting as relay nodes to rebroadcast the frequency regulation signal in a smart grid environment.