Scaling Vehicle-to-Grid Services in Europe: A Smart Grid Architecture Model

Abstract

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services for electric vehicles (EVs) are still in a nascent stage of technological and policy readiness. Although considerable studies emphasize the advantages of integrating EVs as distributed energy resources (DERs) into the grid, there is a significant lack of mature V2G use cases to incentivize EV owners to engage as prosumers. By examining V2G business use cases, such as energy arbitrage and balancing services, a comprehensive analysis is proposed to identify business opportunities benefiting all involved parties from EVs at any grid connection point. This article addresses the business and logical models of, such use cases, tailored to the European energy market by employing harmonized roles from the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) to ensure international scalability. The analysis identifies the combination of direct and indirect V2G demand response balancing programs as the most beneficial solution for saving costs for congestion management and balancing operations while generating revenue for end-users and service providers. To manage cross-domain complexities, the selected and developed solution is presented as a smart grid architecture model (SGAM)-based computational independent model, and ultimately evaluated on country-specific energy markets. The adopted domain-specific language through the SGAM Toolbox aids in model design and provides a foundation for further exploration of its viability.