Wind-Energy-Powered Electric Vehicle Charging Stations: Resource Availability Data Analysis

Fuad Noman,Gamal Alkawsi,Kiong Sieh Tiong,Ammar Ahmed Alkahtani,Vassilios Agelidis,Janaka Ekanayake

doi:10.3390/app10165654

Abstract

The integration of large-scale wind farms and large-scale charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) into electricity grids necessitates energy storage support for both technologies. Matching the variability of the energy generation of wind farms with the demand variability of the EVs could potentially minimize the size and need for expensive energy storage technologies required to stabilize the grid. This paper investigates the feasibility of using the wind as a direct energy source to power EV charging stations. An interval-based approach corresponding to the time slot taken for EV charging is introduced for wind energy conversion and analyzed using different constraints and criteria, including the wind speed averaging time interval, various turbines manufacturers, and standard high-resolution wind speed datasets. A quasi-continuous wind turbine’s output energy is performed using a piecewise recursive approach to measure the EV charging effectiveness. Wind turbine analysis using two years of wind speed data shows that the application of direct wind-to-EV is able to provide sufficient constant power to supply the large-scale charging stations. The results presented in this paper confirm that the potential of direct powering of EV charging stations by wind has merits and that research in this direction is worth pursuing.

Highlights

The rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is making significant progress in addressing the continuous increase of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide [1,2]
The main contributions of this work are the following: (1) we rigorously evaluate the possibility of using stand-alone wind energy sources for direct fast EV charging; (2) we conduct wind speed and power analysis using real-world high sampled datasets from two years; (3) we evaluate different wind turbines using a large library (i.e., 68 turbines) of power curves; and (4) we examine different averaging time intervals for wind speed and their effects on the power output certainty of wind turbines
We described a large-scale fast EV charging approach that considers wind turbines as a direct energy source

Summary

Introduction

The rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is making significant progress in addressing the continuous increase of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide [1,2]. With this considerable progress come enormous challenges. The currently implemented EV charging stations are mostly powered by electric power distributed by utility grids [6,7], other charging station designs powered by various renewable energy sources have been reported in the technical literature. Several studies have used wind energy for EV grid-connected mode [9,10] and off-grid stations [11]. Other studies [12,13] discussed design problems and proposed

Methods

Results

Conclusion