| dc.description.abstract | The adoption of Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) as a substitute to gasoline-based
internal combustion engine vehicles represent a major change in the transportation
sector. Typically, PEVs uses electricity to charge the on-board batteries instead of
gasoline which is used in internal combustion engines. The main advantage of
electrifying the transportation sector is to help lower fuel costs and reduce GreenHouse
Gases (GHGs). Despite being an environmentally friendly means of transportation, the
increased penetration of these electric vehicles may have negative impacts on the
electrical power distribution system components (e.g. distribution primary feeders,
transformers and secondary distribution lines), and as a result of these impacts,
modification and upgrading of the distribution system components may be required. This
can be achieved by increasing the distribution transformer sizes and adding new lines to
the existing system, which may be considered an expensive solution. Several studies
have been conducted to reduce the distribution system modification and upgrading costs,
by coordinating the charging behavior of these vehicles either using centralized or
decentralized control schemes. However, these methods limit the authority of vehicles’
owners regarding when to charge their vehicles which might be inconvenient for some.
On the other hand, electric utilities offer different incentive programs for their customers
to control their energy usage in order to reduce the probability of system failures and to
increase the system reliability while decreasing the costs of infrastructure upgrade.
However, most of these programs have not met the expected response from customers.
In this dissertation, a new strategy is proposed to accomplish self-healing for the electric
grid in order to reduce the negative impacts of PEVs charging demand. This novel
technique is based on applying the Transactive Energy (TE) control concept. The
proposed implementation of the TE concept in this work is based on the adoption of a
multi-agent system at different levels of the electric power distribution system (e.g.,
residential homes, neighborhood areas, and the Distribution System Operator (DSO)).
These agents work in a cooperative manner in order to reach a state of consensus
between the electric power distribution system resources owned by the electric utility
(e.g., distributed generation, community energy storage) and the resources owned by the
homeowners (e.g., rooftop solar photovoltaic, home battery energy storage). Moreover,
the multi-agent system will allow the customers to use their own resources in an optimal
way that can gain the maximum benefits offered through different incentive programs.
The results have shown that the negative impacts on the electric power distribution
system due to the plug-in electric vehicles charging demand can be mitigated by
applying the proposed TE control which requires at least 30% of customers to own
controllable battery energy storage unit. | en |
