Design and Validation of a Smart Charging Algorithm for Power Quality Control in Electrical Distribution Systems

Electric mobility leads to an increasing challenge for power grid operators, particularly due to its irregular and unknown load profiles. In order to keep up with increasing power demand of charging processes, besides better predictions also the active control of charging processes will be necessary to minimize infrastructure costs. This work deals with a distributed smart charging approach which considers real-time grid conditions for supporting the power quality in electric distribution grids in terms of congestion and voltage management. Our approach adopts the traffic light model to indicate the current state of the low voltage grid, which allows smooth changing of the charging power to avoid drastic changes of the grid state. The algorithm is validated by a series of experiments on two setups: Pure software (co-)simulation and Power Hardware In the Loop (PHIL), where physical charging stations and electric cars are controlled in a laboratory setup.