Micha Kahlen

A prof table business model for electric vehicle fleet owners

Fleet owners, as active participants in the decentralized energy grid, are interested in offering mobility services to individual customers, while providing the grid with balancing possibilities. We present a business model for the feet owners of Electric Vehicles (EV) and prove that EVs adoption is benefcial both for the owner and the grid itself. The feet owners main objective is to beneft from the difference between demand and intermittent supply (from renewable energy sources), employing the Vehicle to Grid (V2G) concept. The core idea is based on the feet owners decision for charging the EVs during off peak hours and selling energy on the wholesale market during peak hours. This behavior leads to signif cant profts for the feet and improvements in social welfare owner if the buying and selling decisions are made properly. The impact of a large quantity of EVs on the electricity market is accounted for. We present a charging and discharging algorithm that converts the traditional energy consumer to an active prosumer, while at the same time yields signifcant profts for the fleet owners. Apart from the proftability for fleet owners, we show the positive impact of the proposed algorithm on the energy prices, which leads to social welfare improvement.

Electric Vehicle Storage Management in Operating Reserve Auctions

Carsharing operators, which rent out electric vehicles for minutes or hours, lose money on idle vehicles. We develop a model that allows carsharing operators to offer the storage of these vehicles on operating reserve markets (market for quickly rampable back-up power sources that replace for instance failing power plants). We consider it a dispatch and pricing problem with the tradeoff between the payoffs of offering vehicles for rental and selling their storage. This is a problem of stochastic nature taking into account that people can rent electric vehicles at any time. To evaluate our model we tracked the location and status of 350 electric vehicles from the carsharing company Car2Go and simulated the dispatch in the Dutch market. This market needs to be redesigned for optimal use of storage. We make recommendations for the market redesign and show that carsharing operators can make substantial additional profits in operating reserve markets.

Fleetpower: Creating Virtual Power Plants in Sustainable Smart Electricity Markets

Electric vehicles have the potential to be used as virtual power plants to provide reliable back-up power. This generates additional profits for carsharing rental firms, who rent vehicles by the minute. We show this by developing a discrete event simulation platform based on real-time locational information (GPS) of 1,100 electric cars from Daimlers carsharing service Car2Go in San Diego, Amsterdam, and Stuttgart. We design trading prices (bids and asks) for participating in the respective operating reserve markets, markets for back-up power guaranteeing replacement when a power source fails, to sell the storage from idle electric vehicles. These trading prices are calibrated and tested with operating reserve market data. We investigate the influence of the charging infrastructure density, battery technology, and rental demand for vehicles on the payoff for the carsharing operator. We show that virtual power plants create sustainable revenue streams for electric vehicle carsharing companies without compromising their rental business.

Electric Vehicles: An Agent-Based Approach to Sustainability

Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are difficult to balance for the grid because they are weather dependent. We study how the storage of electric vehicles can balance a grid with an increasing intermittent renewable energy content in the short term and contribute to a more efficient and sustainable smart grid. In the Power Trading Agent Competition, a mulitagent platform, we represent fleets of electric vehicles to make a tradeoff between the conflicting interests of storing intermittent energy in the electric vehicles and driving them. The richness of this platform allows us to draw conclusions for the future of a sustainable grid with electric vehicles.