Menu-based pricing for profitable electric vehicle charging with vehicle-to-grid service

The paper considers a bidirectional power flow model of the electric vehicles (EVs) in a charging station. The EVs can inject energy by discharging via a Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) service which can enhance the profits of the charging station. However, frequent charging and discharging degrade the battery life. A proper compensation needs to be paid to the users to participate in the V2G service. We propose a menu-based pricing scheme, where the charging station selects a price for each arriving user for the amount of battery utilization, the total energy, and the time (deadline) that the EV will stay. The user can accept one of the contracts or rejects all depending on their utilities. The charging station can serve users using a combination of the renewable energy and the conventional energy bought from the grid. The charging station is not aware of the exact utilities, finding the optimal price is computationally difficult. We show that a guaranteed fixed profit pricing scheme in a myopic scenario can maximize the expected profit over a large class of distribution function. In the menu-based pricing, when the harvested renewable energy is small the users have higher incentives for the V2G service.