Planning of Dynamic Wireless Charging Infrastructure for Electric Vehicles

Abstract

The pursuit of lower vehicle emissions has allowed the market share of electric vehicles (EVs) to rapidly increase, which has motivated researchers to develop several charging techniques, aiming to minimize the charging downtime and reduce the range anxiety of EV drivers. Of those techniques, dynamic wireless charging (DWC) has increased in popularity due to the substantial amount of work that has been done in the field of wireless charging. However, with DWC, some unforeseen challenges have risen, including range anxiety and high deployment costs. Accordingly, research efforts are taking place to identify the optimum locations of those dynamic wireless charging lanes (DWCLs) to maximize the system efficiency while minimizing the system cost by reducing the required DWCL lengths. Additionally, the extra load that DWC incurs on a city's power grid must also be considered to avoid overloading the grid. In this work, a realistic simulation is built on Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) software to model traffic on a large scale. Optimization models are then developed to optimally deploy DWCLs in the simulated road network and allocate distributed generation (DG) resources to support the power grid. A simplified version of the optimization model is first verified on a small-scale case study before being fully implemented on a larger road network within the city of Sharjah, UAE. Results reveal that, for a 30% EV penetration level, a DWC system is economically feasible to deploy, to address the anticipated EV charging demand within the road network under consideration. The proposed DWC deployment plan is able to provide approximately $100,000 annual net profit, acknowledging the different capital and operational expenses of the different system components as well as those of the distributed generation resources.