Autonomous Distributionally Robust Virtual Energy Storage Services Based on Parked Electric Vehicles
Nicola Mignoni, Georgios Pantazis, Raffaele Carli, Sergio Grammatico, Mariagrazia Dotoli
AI summary
Problem
Managing virtual energy storage from parked electric vehicles is hindered by stochastic EV availability, uncertain prosumer forecasts, and conflicting objectives between the parking lot manager and prosumers.
Approach
The authors model the interaction as a non-cooperative distributionally robust game using Wasserstein ambiguity sets to handle uncertainty, then derive a tractable convex reformulation solved via variational inequalities.
Key results
- Tractable convex reformulation of the distributionally robust Nash equilibrium
- Equilibrium computed efficiently via variational inequality methods
- Out-of-sample validation on real-world data confirms robust performance across uncertainty levels
- Framework guarantees reliable virtual storage services despite stochastic EV and prosumer dynamics
Why it matters
Enables grid operators and energy communities to safely and profitably aggregate parked EV batteries as reliable storage buffers without precise probabilistic forecasts.
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.