Impact of Different Charging Strategies for Electric Vehicles in an Austrian Office Site

Electric vehicles represent a necessary alternative for wheeled transportation to meet the global and national targets specified in the Paris Agreement of 2016. However, the high concentration of electric vehicles exposes their harmful effects on the power grid. This reflects negatively on electricity market prices, making the charging of electric vehicles less cost-effective. This study investigates the economic potential of different charging strategies for an existing office site in Austria with multiple charging infrastructures. For this purpose, a proper mathematical representation of the investigated case study is needed in order to define multiple optimization problems that are able to determine the financial potential of different charging strategies. This paper presents a method to implement electric vehicles and stationary battery storage in optimization problems with the exclusive use of linear relationships and applies it to a real-life use case with measured data to prove its effectiveness. Multiple aspects of four charging strategies are investigated, and sensitivity analyses are performed. The results show that the management of the electric vehicles charging processes leads to overall costs reduction of more than 30% and an increase in specific power-related grid prices makes the charging processes management more convenient.