Techno-economic analysis of peer to peer energy trading with electric vehicles

One of the most promising technologies of reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the application of electric vehicles (EVs). Despite deliberated efforts by governments with various encouraging policies to promote EV uptakes, the numbers of EVs have not increased as quickly as expected. The growth of EV numbers is hindered by cost, accessibility of charging infrastructures and range anxiety. P2P EV charging might be one of the solutions to mitigate these barriers to promote EV uptakes. P2P EV charging might be able to reduce running costs of EVs, to provide more charging infrastructures via obtaining energy from another individual EVs instead of power grid, and to encourage the installation of P2P charging infrastructures. However, there have not been much work in the literature on the economic benefit analysis of P2P EV charging. The economic analysis is extremely important at this stage for relevant stakeholders (such as power Distributed Network Operators, EV charging infrastructure planner, Charge Point Operators). In order to carry out the economic benefit analysis, this thesis took use of the main thought of activity-based model (ABM) to simulate and estimate EV batteries’ remaining energy after daily travel, and then modified the supply demand ratio (SDR) P2P pricing model for trading prices calculation. The new combination of above two steps was unique and efficient for the calculation of P2P energy trading with EVs. This work also adopted Monte Carlo method using large number of simulations to reduce errors brought by the randomness of simulation cases. The economic benefits of EV energy buyers and sellers were evaluated at different supply and demand scenarios. The results showed that, with the consideration of tariff difference between daytime charging and night charging (Economy 7 tariff) only, P2P EV charging is able to bring energy saving for EV energy buyers up to £3,32/month and bring energy income for EV energy sellers up to £5.48/month. Those reduced electricity costs, from P2P energy trading, although limited, would also encourage people’s purchasing enthusiasm toward EVs, which would consequently help the uptakes of EVs in UK. As P2P energy trading is a relevant new research area, this is an initial economic analysis of P2P EV charging. There are some limitations, e.g. the degradation of batteries, adoption of other P2P pricing models and EV charging from local renewable generators, etc. have not been considered. These will be carried out in future work in this area

Lao, Liyun - Associate Supervisor

MSc by Research in Energy and Power