Enhancing the Charging Process of Electric Vehicles at Residential Homes

It is essential to establish smart and efficient charging strategies for electric vehicles, due to the increase of their sales, and especially taking into account that many of these vehicles will be recharged in private parking lots, where the charging point features are limited. In this paper, we propose four different charging methods: the cheapest, the cheapest starting, the low cost, and the last period schemes, as an alternative to the traditional plug and charge method. Our objective is to find better strategies for an automatic, efficient, and scheduled electric vehicles’ charging process, avoiding peak power demands, and promoting recharges at off-peak hours, where electricity prices are low. According to this, a smart charger could use our proposed methods to enhance the charging process at residential homes. To assess our proposal, we simulate the battery recharging of 1 000 vehicles per day during a full year, considering the use of domestic electrical plugs, and real electricity pricing. In Addition, three different scenarios have been simulated: 1) a regular-demand scenario; 2) a high-demand scenario; and 3) an extra-demand scenario, in which the vehicles arrive with an average battery level of only 25%. Simulation results confirm that using our charging methods, we can save between 46.9% to 75.2% in terms of electricity fee while maintaining similar battery levels after the charging process.