Prioritized EV Charging – Enhanced Smart Meter Gateway infrastructure enabling an event driven flexibility tariff

The German Government plans to have at least 15 million battery electric vehicles (EV) on German roads by 2030. Without intelligent, flexible charging this would require tremendous investments in energy generation and grid infrastructure. This paper outlines a solution for controlled charging of EVs, providing market-driven and grid-serving flexibility. We suggest a regulatory framework for the yellow “grid traffic light phase”, which is coherent with the currently proposed regulatory framework of the German Ministry of Economic Affairs (BMWK) and Climate Protection and the Federal Network Agency (BNetzA). Within this proposed regulatory framework an event driven tariff structure for incentivising flexibility provision on the basis of EV-charging is described. To enable this tariff structure, the Smart Meter Gateway (SMGW) infrastructure needs to be adopted and combined with a home energy management system (HEMS). The paper outlines the technical system architecture of the SMGW and HEMS infrastructure. A detailed analysis of the different options for information exchange between the technical components and the stakeholders is conducted. We also specify the required communication interfaces and new technical functionality of the SMGW. An outlook to the lab test of the enhanced SMGW and HEMS, as well as to the field test for the prioritized charging tariff is provided.