Electric Vehicle Aggregator as an Automatic Reserves Provider Under Uncertain Balancing Energy Procurement

Shift of the power system generation from the fossil to the variable renewables prompted the system operators to search for new sources of flexibility, i.e., new reserve providers. With the introduction of electric vehicles, smart charging emerged as one of the promising solutions. However, electric vehicle aggregators face the uncertainty both on the reserve activation and the electric vehicle availability. These uncertainties can have a detrimental effect on both the aggregators’ profitability and users’ comfort. State-of-the art literature mostly neglects the reserve activation or it’s uncertainty. On top of that, they rarely model European markets which are different that those commonly addressed in the literature. This paper introduces a new method for modeling the reserve activation uncertainty, also termed as balancing energy procurement in the European context, based on the real historic data from the European power system. Three electric vehicle scheduling models were designed and tested: the deterministic, the stochastic and the robust. The results demonstrate that the current deterministic approaches inaccurately represent the activation uncertainty and that the proposed models that consider uncertainty, both the stochastic and the robust, substantially improve the results. Additionally, the sensitivity analysis for the robust model was performed and it demonstrates how a decision-maker can choose its level of conservativeness, portraying its risk-awareness.