Merchant EV charging station expansion planning

Abstract

The significant expansion of Electric Vehicles (EV) creates an uncertain load demand that may pose many challenges to conventional planning methods, especially at the distribution network level. The development of EV technology requires charging infrastructure, which must be considered in the Distribution System Expansion Planning (DSEP). Due to the presence of EV and the load they impose on the distribution system, the planning of EV charging stations is done simultaneously with the DSEP so that the system operator can properly consider the technical constraints of the network and operational constraints. This paper presents a bi-level model for EV charging station expansion planning. The main purpose of the first level problem is expansion planning of charging stations and distribution system. But the charging stations are mostly built by a merchant investor, and they do so when it is profitable and has a reasonable risk. Therefore, the merchant investor should be encouraged to build a charging station in the planned areas. For this reason, in the second level problem, the profitability of the charging station and its risk are examined. To solve this problem, genetic algorithm (GA) has been used. Finally, to test the proposed model, the simulation was performed on a modified 69-bus IEEE network.