Advanced Vehicle-to-Grid: Architecture, Applications, and Smart City Integration

Electric vehicles (EVs) will become prevalent in this decade. An EV is equipped with a battery, which enables its interaction with the power grid in many interesting ways. An EV not only gets charged from but also discharges its energy back to the grid. Due to their mobility, an aggregation of EVs turns into a significant energy resource with high flexibility and convenience, constituting the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system. In this chapter, we investigate some advanced V2G technologies in terms of architecture, applications, and smart city integration. We first introduce various system components and discuss a hierarchal structure, which is generalized to most V2G architecture. Then several innovative applications are reviewed, including frequency regulation, voltage regulation, unit commitment, and energy trading. After that, we study how V2G can be enhanced with new vehicular technologies and integrated into a smart city. EVs with self-driving capability allow us to drive a fleet of vehicles to strive for various V2G objectives. With the support of dynamic wireless power transfer, we can turn a road network into a big energy buffer, which can function like V2G. It can be seen that V2G technologies continue to evolve, become smarter, and cultivate new applications which are impossible before.