Infrastructure planning for airport microgrid integrated with electric aircraft and parking lot electric vehicles

Abstract

To achieve net-zero emissions in aviation industry with defined CO2 mitigation objectives in “Flightpath 2050″, electric propulsion system becomes an attractive technology. Many electric aircraft (EA) prototypes with a fully electrically powered propulsion system for short-haul commuting air transport have been designed in recent years. Planning and designing the ground power systems and associated electric aircraft charging facilities are also essential for realising aviation electrification. In this work, a bi-objective infrastructure planning framework for airport microgrid to accommodate parking lot electric vehicles (EVs) and EA is developed, and the impact of V2G on the airport microgrid is assessed. The dispatching problem of the airport microgrid is formulated as a heuristic optimisation problem, and the NSGA-II algorithm is adopted to find the Pareto Fronts and optimal solutions. There are two different scheduling strategies for charging EA: plug-in charge and battery swap. The economic and technological assessments for both strategies are conducted and compared. The results show that adopting V2G strategy can improve the airport microgrid economic performance. In general, the EA plug-in charge strategy performs better than the EA battery strategy in terms of microgrid resilience, while the EA battery swap strategy can reduce the operation costs of the airport microgrid.