Optimal Design of Battery-Supported Fast-Charging Systems on Australian Highways

These Installed planning of charging infrastructure on remote highways could be problematic; Mostly, EV users need to charge their EVs at the maximum power rate because they need to minimize their charging time as fast as possible. Nevertheless, the high volume of EVs flowing to the remote highway can lead to high peak loads on the zone substation in the local distribution network. Moreover, charging stations on remote highways are often located far from zone substations in regions with poor networks and high peak demand, which significantly impacting power quality in the distribution network. The battery energy storage system is used to service the peak demand by maintaining power quality without expensive distribution network upgrades and can help the local network supply the average demand.

This study presents a new novel using multi-objective optimization to determine the optimal energy storage capacity to service the remote highway's fast-charging station. The results show that our proposed method can maintain the voltage drop and reduce high peak demand with the lowest cost on the remote Australian highway compared with the statical method. The optimal energy storage size must not be too small to cope with variations in traffic flow and maintain the peak and average demand over 24-hours, but not too large that it may increase the investment in the charging station.