CAREER: Towards Grid-Responsive Electrified Transportation Systems: Modeling, Aggregation, and Market Integration

The massive trend of transportation electrification brings about new opportunities and challenges at the nexus of electric power systems and transportation systems. Making the electrified transportation system grid-responsive can unlock significant economic value by monetizing its spatiotemporal charging flexibility for grid services. This CAREER project aims to establish the conceptual and algorithmic bedrock for grid-responsive electrified transportation systems. The proposed research will facilitate transportation electrification, support renewable integration, and speed up the decarbonization of both transportation and electricity systems. This will be achieved by developing novel concepts and models for coupled power and transportation systems, and a comprehensive algorithmic toolkit to bring the spatiotemporal flexibility in electric vehicle (EV) charging loads to electricity markets. The intellectual merits of the project include advancing knowledge at the interface of power systems and transportation engineering, by integrating expertise in foundational disciplines of control theory, systems science, optimization (both convex and nonconvex), game theory, economics, and statistical learning. The broader impacts of the project include (a) contributing to better matching charging loads with renewable generation while creating new revenue streams for EV owners, (b) spurring wider adoption of EVs without subsidy while defining new entrepreneurial opportunities in charging aggregation for diverse grid services, (c) training a generation of engineers at the intersection of power engineering, transportation engineering, and systems engineering, and (d) generating multiple engagement opportunities for K-12 students and adult education students. Realizing the vision of grid-responsive electrified transportation systems requires deep integration of expertise in power and transportation systems. This project will make original contributions to this emerging interdisciplinary field by: (a) examining fundamental couplings between transportation and power systems introduced by transportation electrification, uncovering their implications, and developing unified models for the coupled systems, (b) devising computationally efficient algorithms to aggregate and control spatiotemporal flexibility of a large EV fleet, and identifying standardized representations of the resulting aggregate flexibility, and (c) exploring ways to integrate charging flexibility into transmission- and distribution-level electricity markets. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.