Mid Sweden University

In the last years, the increased environmental awareness is calling for the transition from vehicles powered by Internal Combustion Engines (ICEs) toward Electric Vehicles (EVs). Nevertheless, the wide penetration of such technologies is limited by the impact EV Charging Stations (EVCSs) have on the distribution grid. The management of EVCSs could benefit from the use of the energy produced by Renewable Resources, appropriately coupled with storage system, through the infrastructures offered by Smart Grids (SGs). The validation of these architectures can be performed in simulation or emulation environments. Whilst such approaches are profitable for validating the sensitivity of different architectures to parameters changes, sometimes the use of over-simplified models could bring to unreliable results. For this reason, a testing facility for the characterization of the integration of EVCSs in SGs has been designed and deployed at the eLUX lab of the University of Brescia, Italy. The testing facility includes an EVCS (22 kW), an EV (Renault Zoe), a controllable photovoltaic (PV) field (10 kWp) and a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) (20 kWp, 23.5 kWh). The possibility to integrate a real-time emulator (OPAL-RT) for Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) emulation allows to easily expand the capabilities of the testing facility. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.