Cost optimization and reliability assessment of a microgrid with large-scale plug-in electric vehicles participating in demand response programs

In this paper, an effective objective function is proposed to minimize the cost of operation of a microgrid with large-scale plug-in electric vehicles and renewable energy resources. The profit of consumers is taken into account by utilizing the incentives in the demand response programs, and vehicle-to-grid feature of the plug-in-electric vehicles integrated into the grid. The optimization is performed using genetic algorithms. Also, reliability indices of the economically optimized microgrid are computed for various operation configurations in both the grid-tied and islanded modes. Numerical studies are conducted on a microgrid testbed to validate the performance of the proposed strategy.