Autonomous Distributionally Robust Virtual Energy Storage Services Based on Parked Electric Vehicles

Abstract

We propose a novel model of a virtual energy storage system (ESS) that leverages the aggregate battery capacity of parked and idling electric vehicles (EVs). Such an energy service is offered to a community of prosumers as a temporary energy buffer and managed by a parking lot manager (PLM), which absorbs the risks arising from the unreliability of the EV-based ESS due to the arrival and departure of EVs. Hence, from the prosumers' perspective, such a virtual storage service behaves deterministically. Both the PLM and the prosumers act as self-interested agents that optimize their own objectives, subject to operational constraints, leading to a non-cooperative game. To deal with the uncertainty of prosumers' renewable net generation and EVs' arrivals/departures, we use a data-driven distributionally robust approach, showing that a tractable reformulation can be obtained, where the equilibrium solutions can be computed as a variational inequality. Numerical simulations based on real data illustrate the behavior of the proposed model.