Novel grid-connected solar/wind powered electric vehicle charging station with vehicle-to-grid technology

Abstract

In this paper, a novel grid-connected solar/wind powered electric vehicle charging station with vehicle-to-grid technology is designed and constructed. The solar/wind powered electric vehicle charging station consists of a photovoltaic array, a wind energy conversion system, two unidirectional (Direct Current)/(Direct Current) converters connected to the photovoltaic array and wind energy conversion system, a unified maximum power point tracking controller, 15 bidirectional (Direct Current)/(Direct Current) converters associated with the 15 charging stations provided for charging electric vehicles, and a three-phase bidirectional (Direct Current)/(Alternating Current) inverter connected to the grid. The contribution of this work is that the grid-connected solar/wind powered electric vehicle charging station presented in this work is the only large-scale constructed charging station reported in the literature that combines two renewable resources (solar and wind) together to produce electric power to charge electric vehicles, and moreover, it maximally converts solar and wind energy into electric energy because it uses a novel fast and highly accurate unified maximum power point tracking technique that concurrently tracks the maximum power points of both photovoltaic array and wind energy conversion system. It is demonstrated that the constructed charging station not only provides electric energy to charge electric vehicles but also balances load demand in the grid connected to it.