skip to main content


Title: Willingness to delay charging of electric vehicles
Electrification of vehicles is becoming one of the main avenues for decarbonization of the transportation market. To reduce stress on the energy grid, large-scale charging will require optimal scheduling of when electricity is delivered to vehicles. Coordinated electric-vehicle charging can produce optimal, flattened loads that would improve reliability of the power system as well as reduce system costs and emissions. However, a challenge for successful introduction of coordinated deadline-scheduling of residential charging comes from the demand side: customers would need to be willing both to defer charging their vehicles and to accept less than a 100% target for battery charge. Within a coordinated electric-vehicle charging pilot run by the local utility in upstate New York, this study analyzes the necessary incentives for customers to accept giving up control of when charging of their vehicles takes place. Using data from a choice experiment implemented in an online survey of electric-vehicle owners and lessees in upstate New York (N=462), we make inference on the willingness to pay for features of hypothetical coordinated electric-vehicle charging programs. To address unobserved preference heterogeneity, we apply Variational Bayes (VB) inference to a mixed logit model. Stochastic variational inference has recently emerged as a fast and computationally-efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for scalable Bayesian estimation of discrete choice models. Our results show that individuals negatively perceive the duration of the timeframe in which the energy provider would be allowed to defer charging, even though both the desired target for battery charge and deadline would be respected. This negative monetary valuation is evidenced by an expected average reduction in the annual fee of joining the charging program of $2.64 per hour of control yielded to the energy provider. Our results also provide evidence of substantial heterogeneity in preferences. For example, the 25% quantile of the posterior distribution of the mean of the willingness to accept an additional hour of control yielded to the utility is $5.16. However, the negative valuation of the timeframe for deferring charging is compensated by positive valuation of emission savings coming from switching charging to periods of the day with a higher proportion of generation from renewable sources. Customers also positively valued discounts in the price of energy delivery.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1632124
PAR ID:
10209596
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
25th Annual Conference of the European Association Environmental and Resource Economists
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Energy markets are rapidly changing with smarter, connected, more reliable infrastructure and cleaner generation on the supply side, and more choice, greater control and enhanced flexibility for customers. This paper examines willingness to pay for bundled smart home energy products and information services, using data from a set of two discrete choice experiments that were part of a survey by the regional energy provider of upstate New York. To let the data reveal how preferences are distributed in the population, a logit-mixed logit model in willingness-to-pay space and a combination of observed and unobserved preference heterogeneity was specified and fitted. Results show that residents of Tompkins County are willing to pay more than in other counties for residential storage, and that for home energy management there is an important generational divide with millennials being much more likely to perceive the economic value in the smart energy technologies. The flexible logit-mixed logit estimates provide evidence of important heterogeneity in preferences: whereas most of the population has a positive –albeit rather low– valuation of smart energy products and services, there is a considerable percentage of customers with negative perceptions. 
    more » « less
  2. Charging stations are the basic infrastructure for accommodating the energy needs of electric vehicles (EVs). Companies are expected to invest in these charging stations by installing them at locations with a dense concentration of vehicles, such as parking places, commercial centres, and workplaces. In order for investors in EV charging stations to maximise their profits and mitigate the impact on the power grid, these stations would benefit from coupling with an energy storage system (ESS). ESS would be used to arbitrage energy and to balance out the time‐variant and uncertain EV energy demand. This study proposes a framework to optimise the offering/bidding strategy of an ensemble of charging stations coupled with ESS in the day‐ahead electricity market. The proposed framework accounts for degradation of the ESS, robust scheduling against price uncertainty, as well as stochastic energy demand from EVs. The results show the viability of the proposed framework in providing cost savings to an ensemble of EV charging stations.

     
    more » « less
  3. The inconvenience of charging is one of the major concern for potential electric vehicle (EV) users. In addition to building more charging facilities, electric vehicle charging assistance service has emerged for making EV charging more convenient to customers. In this paper, we consider an optimal EV charging station location problem with two types of customers. One is ordinary self-charging customers whereas the other is customers using a new service mode called valet-charging. We formulate the problem via bi-level location optimization model, where the lower level problem is a game model that characterizes customers’ station choice behaviors. To solve the hard nonlinear mixed-integer optimization problem, we design an adaptive large neighbourhood search (ALNS) algorithm for the upper level problem and a construct-improve heuristic for the lower level problem. We conduct numerical experiments to justify the efficiency of our solution method. We also conduct a need-inspired case study to derive practical insights which will help EV charging assistant service providers make strategic decisions. The convenience of charging service is one major concern for EVs. In China, NIO Inc., NETA AUTO, and FAW-Volkswagen have started to provide valet-charging service. Charging station location problem becomes complicated while taking this service into account. We believe our work develops an effective tool for charging station planners to analyze station locations as well as the impact of valet charging services. 
    more » « less
  4. We are witnessing a rapid growth of electrified vehicles due to the ever-increasing concerns on urban air quality and energy security. Compared to other types of electric vehicles, electric buses have not yet been prevailingly adopted worldwide due to their high owning and operating costs, long charging time, and the uneven spatial distribution of charging facilities. Moreover, the highly dynamic environment factors such as unpredictable traffic congestion, different passenger demands, and even the changing weather can significantly affect electric bus charging efficiency and potentially hinder the further promotion of large-scale electric bus fleets. To address these issues, in this article, we first analyze a real-world dataset including massive data from 16,359 electric buses, 1,400 bus lines, and 5,562 bus stops. Then, we investigate the electric bus network to understand its operating and charging patterns, and further verify the necessity and feasibility of a real-time charging scheduling. With such understanding, we design busCharging , a pricing-aware real-time charging scheduling system based on Markov Decision Process to reduce the overall charging and operating costs for city-scale electric bus fleets, taking the time-variant electricity pricing into account. To show the effectiveness of busCharging , we implement it with the real-world data from Shenzhen, which includes GPS data of electric buses, the metadata of all bus lines and bus stops, combined with data of 376 charging stations for electric buses. The evaluation results show that busCharging dramatically reduces the charging cost by 23.7% and 12.8% of electricity usage simultaneously. Finally, we design a scheduling-based charging station expansion strategy to verify our busCharging is also effective during the charging station expansion process. 
    more » « less
  5. Cities around the world are increasingly promoting electric vehicles (EV) to reduce and ultimately eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. A huge number of EVs will put unprecedented stress on the power grid. To efficiently serve the increased charging load, these EVs need to be charged in a coordinated fashion. One promising coordination strategy is vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) charging coordination, enabling EVs to sell their surplus energy in an ad-hoc, peer to peer manner. This paper introduces an Information Centric Networking (ICN)-based protocol to support ad-hoc V2V charging coordination (V2V-CC). Our evaluations demonstrate that V2V-CC can provide added flexibility, fault tolerance, and reduced communication latency than a conventional centralized cloud based approach. We show that V2V-CC can achieve a 93% reduction in protocol completion time compared to a conventional approach. We also show that V2V-CC also works well under extreme packet loss, making it ideal for V2V charging coordination. 
    more » « less