Community-Based Solar-Powered Electric Vehicle Parking Lots

The number of electric vehicle parking lots (EVPLs) and charging stations (CSs) is increasing due to the high penetration of electric vehicles (EVs). On the other hand, the operation and planning of EVPLs are more important than before due to parking lot-to-grid (PL2G) capability as a flexible resource in future smart grids. Also, the parking lot owners (PLOs) want to increase their profits because of selling energy to EV owners (EVOs) and selling energy to the distribution network operator (DNO). Since these EVs need a lot of energy for charging, the PLOs for obtaining more profit can use renewable energy sources such as wind or solar energies in addition to distribution network energy. Also, if there are two or more EVPLs, their owners can exchange energy together (i.e., parking lot-to-parking lot (PL2PL) capability) in a community unit by setting a suitable price. Therefore, the PL2PL strategy that is a viable flexible option from PLO owners point of view leads to maximizing their profits. In fact, in this situation for optimal operation or planning, the operational behavior of EVPLs should be modeled. Therefore, in this chapter, the stochastic community-based model of solar-powered EVPLs suggests with the PL2G and PL2PL abilities. The proposed model is a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem which includes the uncertainty of the solar energy (SE) and the EVs. The model applies to a system with three EVPLs. The results prove the effectiveness of the model.