Simulating and sizing an independent electric vehicle charging station powered by solar photovoltaic via Matlab/Simulink

Abstract

The aim of the study is to design a standalone charging station to facilitate the transition to the use of electric vehicles (EV) and reduce the energy dependence from the grid. This was achieved with solar photovoltaic (PV) and a battery. The charging system and EV were simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK. The simulation contains three main aspects: the solar powered charging station, an EV based on an electric jeep (E-Jeep) and the connection between the two. A use case was also simulated using data from the E-jeep running on campus to study the operations of the designed system in a real-world scenario. In this case, the charging station comprised 3.15 kWp of solar power and 18 kWh of battery capacities in order to sustain the activity of one E-jeep with a battery requiring 13 kWh for an 8-hour operation per day. This design considers the minimum capacity for the use case and the selected location. Thus, increasing the capacity of the solar PV system to account for intermittency of solar energy should be considered.