Novel solar powered electric vehicle charging station with the capability of vehicle-to-grid

In this study, a novel grid-connected solar powered electric vehicle (EV) charging station with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology is designed and constructed. The solar powered EV charging station consists of a photovoltaic (PV) array, a DC/DC converter dedicated to the PV array, a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controller, 15 bidirectional DC/DC converters dedicated to the 15 charging stations provided for charging EVs, and a bidirectional DC/AC inverter connected between the charging station and grid. The contribution of this work is that the grid-connected solar powered EV charging station presented in this work optimally converts solar energy into electric energy because it uses a novel proposed fast and highly accurate MPPT technique. Furthermore, this work includes experimental results obtained from the daily operation of the constructed EV charging station, while other works are only simulation based. It is experimentally verified that the EV charging station not only produces enough electric energy to charge EVs during sunny days but also balances load demand in the local grid during cloudy days.