A smart platform (BEVPro) for modeling, evaluating, and optimizing community microgrid integrated with buildings, distributed renewable energy, electricity storage, and electric vehicles

To achieve net-zero emissions, smart microgrid technologies like building-electric-vehicle (building-EV) energy networks with distributed renewable energy (RE) and energy storage are receiving growing attention. Nonetheless, there are few easy-to-use simulation platforms for conveniently and fast modeling and optimizing building-EV energy networks since it involves many research fields. In this study, a novel open-sourced simulating platform, BEVPro, was proposed to easily and accurately model and evaluate building-EV networks integrating buildings, REs, onsite electric batteries, and EVs. Firstly, the development of BEVPro was introduced. Then, a series of simulations on a community microgrid with 30 buildings, solar panels, onsite batteries, and 30 EVs, was conducted via BEVPro to optimize the investigated network. To be specific, in the comparison of annual energy amounts and grid powers for validating the accuracy of BEVPro with TRNSYS, the differences are smaller than 1.1% and 6.4%, respectively. Then the influences of different quantities of energy components (like the EV) were explored, and the four rule-based strategies were compared via BEVPro, of which the optimal strategy with the largest economic benefits (reducing 61.5% energy cost for residents) was selected for the parametric optimization of the energy components and control strategy, to further improve the energy flexibility of the building-EV network.