The Electric Vehicle in Smart Homes: A Review and Future Perspectives

Abstract

The electric mobility dissemination is forcing the adoption of new technologies and operation paradigms, not only focusing on smart grids, but also on smart homes. In fact, the emerging technologies for smart homes are also altering the conventional grids toward smart grids. By combining the key pillars of electric mobility and smart homes, this paper characterizes the paradigms of the electric vehicle (EV) in smart homes, presenting a review about the state-of-the-art and establishing a relation with future perspectives. Since the smart home must be prepared to deal with the necessities of the EV, the analysis of both on-board and off-board battery charging systems are considered in the paper. Moreover, the inclusion of renewable energy sources, energy storage systems, and dc electrical appliances in smart homes towards sustainability is also considered in this paper, but framed in the perspective of an EV off-board battery charging system. As a pertinent contribution, this paper offers future perspectives for the EV in smart homes, including the possibility of ac, dc, and hybrid smart homes. Covering all of these aspects, exemplificative and key results are presented based on numerical simulations and experimental results obtained with a proof-of-concept prototype.