Towards Sustainable Mobility: An Optimization-Based Approach for Smart EV Charging Reducing Grid and Environmental Impact

The widespread use of the electric vehicle (EV) will put a strain on the electricity charging cost, distribution network stress, and environmental impact due to polluting emissions from the generation mix. This vision leads to developing smart charging strategies, especially in low-voltage distribution networks, to take advantage of local photovoltaic (PV) generation and long car parking periods at home or at the workplace. This paper presents a novel EV smart charging model for private charging stations as a deterministic mixed-integer linear programming problem. It pursues to minimize the EV charging cost while efficiently managing PV self-consumption, PV surplus, and vehicle-to-grid capability via retail price signals. The dependency on the distribution network is reduced through a limited contracted power. The users' environmental concern is included, being influenced by the share of generation technologies free of CO2 emission. The results demonstrate that the smart EV charging optimization in individual or collective charging stations has huge potential to reduce the energy supply cost and enhance the use of existing EV infrastructure, reducing the need for network upgrades and enabling a higher hosting capacity. Indeed, the results show that the EV charging cost has been reduced by more than 40.4%, and the contracted power up to 68.7% in collective charging stations compared to uncontrolled EV charging.