Combined Heat and Power Unit Commitment with Smart Parking Lots of Plug-in Electric Vehicles

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology has drawn great interest in the recent years and its efficiency depends on scheduling of charging process of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) as small portable power plants in smart parking lots. On the other hand, active shift from centralized to decentralized power generation and environmental concerns have caused an increase in the utilization of combined heat and power (CHP) units in power systems. The goal of this study is to develop and simulate a novel approach for combined heat and power unit commitment with PEVs for cost reduction in electric power system. A schedule for charging and discharging processes of PEVs with respect to load curve variations is proposed in this paper. A modified test system consisting of conventional TG (thermal power generating) units, CHP units, and PEVs is employed to investigate the impacts of PEVs on generation scheduling. For the modified test system, results obtained are encouraging and indicate both the feasibility of the proposed technique and its effectiveness on generation scheduling.