Management and Economic Merits of Wide-area Cooperation among Microgrids Coupled with MaaS

Abstract

Microgrid (MG) would be a promising option to improve energy efficiency and resiliency against disasters. However, one of the biggest motivations for deploying MGs on a commercial scale is to bring stable economic benefits to MG operators and end users by reducing operating costs. This paper shows that shared electric vehicles (EVs) in the MaaS society can bring economic benefits to MGs by using them as mobile storage batteries. First, this paper proposes an “EV and Energy” Management system (E²MS), which realizes efficient energy supply with using shared EVs as mobile storage batteries while satisfying EV-sharing requests. Numerical case studies show that the proposed E²MS enables wide-area coordination among MGs and EVs and mobile energy storage function of EVs would have a superior economical potential over stationary storage batteries in MG application.