Carbon Free Smart City: IoT Infrastructure for Electricity Sharing

IoT infrastructure is rapidly expected to play an important role for achieving sustainable and resilient urban designs. IoT is often discussed with AI applications in smart city context including auto-drive system such as... [ view full abstract ]

IoT infrastructure is rapidly expected to play an important role for achieving sustainable and resilient urban designs. IoT is often discussed with AI applications in smart city context including auto-drive system such as google cars. We argue that IoT is also very important for energy resilience as a major strategy to achieve carbon free smart city. Especially energy resilience is important in Japan after we had experienced very long blackout after the Great Eastern Earthquake in 2011.

 This study focuses on a new concept to advance Vehicle to Community (V2C) systems. Namely, we propose to enhance energy resilience using IoT infrastructure embedded into the road network systems. In this system, carbon free electricity generated from massively deployed roof top Photo Voltaic (PV) panels is stored into batteries of Electric Vehicle (EV), not only parking at home or office, but also when it is running on the roads equipped with IoT infrastructures. So, the all electricity could be shared within a community to satisfy household electricity demands and transport electricity demands at the same time.

Our previous studies have showed the effectiveness of PV-EV electricity sharing system, when the electricity is charged into the EV during they are paring at home. In this study, we newly consider the IoT infrastructure in the road networks which could be achieved in the future. Consideration of road networks will be also important to integrate the V2C system with IoT-based transportation systems, such as auto-driving and WPT (Wireless Power Transfer) systems. WPT is especially important for our proposal because it allows us to charge into EVs on the roads directly.

In this paper, we study how to design electricity sharing community clusters considering actual road network (and WPT) and try to clarify to what extent the V2C system with/without WPT can achieve electricity self-sufficiency (Yokohama city as the test site). Firstly, we develop a meta-heuristic algorithm to optimize the community clusters considering actual road network. Secondly, we test community clustering under several possible scenarios, including with/without WPT. We analyze the situations where parking (at home and office) and driving EVs are used as charging batteries. The results suggest that additional use of driving EVs could significantly improves energy self-sufficiency of communities.