As the share of renewable energy becomes an increasing part of electricity generation, electric vehicles (EVs) have the potential to be used as virtual power plants (VPP) to provide reliable back-up power. This could generate additional profits for EV car sharing rental firms. We design a computational control mechanism for VPPs that decide whether EVs should be charging, discharging, or rented out. We validate our computational design by developing a discrete-event simulation platform based on real-time GPS information from 1,100 electric cars from Daimler’s car sharing service Car2Go in San Diego, Amsterdam, and Stuttgart. We compute trading prices (bids and asks) for participating in secondary control reserve markets and investigate what effect the density of charging infrastructure, battery technology, and rental demand for vehicles have on the pay-off for the car sharing fleet. We show that VPPs can create sustainable revenue streams for electric vehicle car sharing fleets without compromising their rental business.
