Energy Management Strategies for Electric Aircraft Charging Leveraging Active Landside Vehicle-to-Grid

Abstract

The deployment of medium-range battery electric aircraft is a promising pathway to improve the environmental footprint of air mobility. Yet such a deployment would be accompanied by significant electric power requirements at airports due to aircraft charging. Given the growing prevalence of electric vehicles and their bi-directional charging capabilities--so-called vehicle-to-grid (V2G)--we study energy buffer capabilities of parked electric vehicles to alleviate pressure on grid connections. To this end, we present energy management strategies for airports providing cost-optimal apron and landside V2G charge scheduling. Specifically, we first formulate the optimal energy management problem of joint aircraft charging and landside V2G coordination as a linear program, whereby we use partial differential equations to model the aggregated charging dynamics of the electric vehicle fleet. Second, we consider a shuttle flight network with a single hub of a large Dutch airline, real-world grid prices, and synthetic parking garage occupancy data to test our framework. Our results show that V2G at even a single airport can indeed reduce energy costs to charge the aircraft fleet: Compared to a baseline scenario without V2G, the proposed concept yields cost savings of up to 32%, depending on the schedule and amount of participating vehicles, and has other potential beneficial effects on the local power grid, e.g., the reduction of potential power peaks.