Energy Resilient Smart Community: Sharing Green Electricity Using V2C Technology

In order to design energy resilient communities against disaster-driven blackout risks, this paper propose a new system to share photovoltaic (PV) generated green electricity using V2G technology, which we call vehicle to community (V2C) system. In this system, electricity generated from widely introduced solar photovoltaic panels (PVs) is stored in the “cars not in use” in a city. In Japan, almost half of the cars in the central Tokyo metropolitan area are used only on weekends and thus are kept parked during weekdays. These cars represent a huge new potential storage depot if they were replaced by electric vehicles (EVs), that is, they could be used as storage batteries in a V2G system to attain carbon neutral energy self-sufficient community. The results of our study showed that although the entire electricity surplus (PV supply minus demand) could be stored without waste if 12% of the EVs not in use were utilized as storage batteries at an aggregate (city) level in August (with maximum solar irradiance), there exist significant regional mismatches at the local district level. Hence, based on the geographical electricity surplus estimates, this paper develops a metaheuristic-based graph portioning spatial clustering algorithm to find optimal spatial clusters which minimizing local spatial discrepancies between electricity surplus and storage potential.