Impact Evaluation of Electric Vehicle Parking on Solving Security-Constrained Unit Commitment Problem

In this paper, the employment of a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system in the security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) problem is considered. SCUC has gained remarkable attention from researchers in the field of electric power systems, aiming to determine the generation schedule in which the system operator maximizes the system security and minimizes the generation costs, while satisfying the system and units’ constraints. Tremendous technological advances in recent years have attracted the attention of system operators to utilize novel sources of electricity, accompanied with thermal units. To this end, V2G technology recently drew remarkable consideration as a new energy resource. V2G reduces the dependence of electricity production procedures on small-scale and costly thermal units, and subsequently has a strong impact on the operation costs and ameliorates the management of load vacillations. This paper presents the use of V2G in scheduling and operating power systems. A successful technique for investigating the impacts of V2G on a real power system is running SCUC on power systems in which electric vehicle parking is installed on different buses. In order to assess its applicability, the proposed method has been applied in two case studies: the IEEE 6-bus system and the extended IEEE 30-bus system. This study presents two simulation scenarios: the SCUC problem was first evaluated separately, and then in the presence of some electrical vehicles connected to the grid. The results demonstrate the reduction of the total operation cost. In addition, by using the proposed method, the operator can specify the optimal number of vehicles needed in the parking each hour. The results can help the system operators and designers in designing, planning, and operating such power systems