A Power Hardware-In-the-Loop Laboratory Setup to Study the Operation of Bidirectional Electric Vehicles Charging Stations

The needs for decarbonizing the entire energy sys-tem calls for new operational approaches in different sectors, currently (almost) fully dominated by fossil fuels, such as the transports. In particular, the decarbonization of the people transport, based on the implementation of Battery Electric Vehicles, may have a twofold benefit, because of (i) the reduction of local and global emissions, and (ii) the role that the Battery Electric Vehicles can have in supporting the operation of grids in case of large share of non-dispatchable renewable energy sources. This papers aims to investigate, through a Power Hardware-In-the-Loop laboratory setup, the impact of the Vehicle-to-Grid and Grid-to-Vehicle paradigms on a Low Voltage grid portions serving as microgrid an energy community. The results show that the grid losses, if not taken into account, can cause a wrong evaluation of the impact of the Battery Electric Vehicles on the grid.