Simulation-based Flexibility Calculation of Electric Vehicle Fleets for Offering Vehicle-to-Grid Services based on Statistical Distributions

Nowadays, managing electric energy is an important task to ensure stabilization of the power grid. The growth of renewable energy resources and the reduction of fossil energy resources made this task more crucial, as more energy fluctuations need to be balanced. The growth of electric vehicles (EVs) enables the potential to support grid balancing, as their batteries can be used as energy buffer for vehicle-to-grid (V2G). However, when merging a certain number of EVs to an EV fleet for such services, a challenging task is to calculate the usable energy (flexibility) of the fleet that can be used for V2G services. There are approaches dealing with flexibility, but there exist gaps such as missing combination of different influence factors resulting from detailed statistical EV usage behaviour or missing the consideration of relevant parameters necessary for a flexibility calculation. This paper proposes a simulation approach considering several relevant influence factors to calculate negative and positive flexibility of an EV fleet. The model contains the simulation of single EV users with statistical mobility and plugin behaviour and the simulation of the EVs including charging processes, charging behaviour and energy consumption. The results show that the approach calculates valid flexibilities of an EV fleet validated by charging data.