Reactive Power Compensation Capabilities of V2G-Enabled Electric Vehicles

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) paradigm is a way of executing services in favor of the grid by electric vehicles (EVs) with bidirectional battery chargers (BBC). The V2G service that has attracted the major interest is the exchange of active power for load leveling purposes. Less attention has received the so-called ancillary V2G services, such as the reactive power compensation. This service is much attractive since it does not involve any exchange of active power and, therefore, leaves the EV batteries charged and does not expose them to additional discharging-charging cycles. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the capabilities of V2G-enabled EVs in executing the reactive power compensation, whether done alone or simultaneously with either battery charging or battery power delivery to the grid. Two topologies of BBC are examined, namely the topologies with the dc side of the charger either directly connected to the battery or through a bidirectional dc-dc converter of buck type. This paper closes by reporting experimental results that corroborate the theoretical findings.