Economic assessment of an electric vehicle parking lot equipped with photovoltaic generation, energy storage system and electric vehicle chargers

Abstract

The electric vehicle (EV) fleet has been growing considerably in the last decades, bringing new challenges and opportunities for the electricity system, especially for the Distribution System Operators. In this regard, it is of the utmost importance that governments adopt policies to ensure a robust infrastructure to serve the electric vehicle owners in order not to discourage them from buying those vehicles. This is important since electric vehicles are an eco-friendly mobility fleet that can reduce fossil fuel dependency, noise pollution, help countries to reach the Paris Agreement’s terms and bring some benefits to the electricity system. In this regard, electric vehicle parking lots (EVPL) can play an important role by providing charging stations to those vehicles. But it is very important that the EVPLs are well located and well sized in order to ensure that they can be profitable. This work presents a methodology to determine the optimal size of an EVPL that will not only charge EVs but also have an energy storage system (ESS) and photovoltaic generation (PV) services. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the profitability of the EVPL operation for 20 years. The proposed methodology shows that a well-sited and well-sized EVPL can be profitable. Moreover, this thesis shows the importance of an energy storage system (ESS) to ensure the profitability of the EVPL and also the positive impact of the photovoltaic (PV) generation in the EVPL profit, when combined to the ESS.