Design and operation of solar-hydrogen-storage integrated electric vehicle charging station in smart city

Abstract

This paper proposes the novel design and operation of solar-hydrogen-storage (SHS) integrated electric vehicle (EV) charging station in future smart cities, with two key functionalities: 1. super-fast and off-grid charging; 2. multi-energy charging system using solar, hydrogen and energy storage. The integrated system design and modelling of SHS-EV charging station include hydrogen fuel cell generator to conduct off-grid and high-density power generation, a local solar power generation facility, a power-to-gas electrolysis for hydrogen production from power grid and solar power, and hydrogen and battery storage facilities to conduct local energy balancing. The operation model of SHS-EV charging station is established through a nonlinear optimization problem with complex objective function. Objective function of SHS-EV charging station is to minimize the operation costs including hydrogen fuel and electricity purchase costs. The system constraints are the technical limits of individual energy devices, as well as the system-level balancing of energy supply with the EV charging demand. The simulation results show that the proposed SHS-EV charging station can meet the EV charging demand by super-fast and off- grid charging from multi-energy sources. The SHS-EV charging station can also provide CO2 free power generation at point of charging. By using particle swarm optimization (PSO) to solve the SHS-EV charging system optimization model in MATLAB, the operation costs of SHS-EV charging station are greatly reduced.