Multi-session smart night charging of EVs for accelerated decarbonization of electric mobility

Felix Wieberneit, Emanuele Crisostomi, Anthony Quinn, Homayoun Hamedmoghadam and Robert Shorten

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: The majority of electric vehicles (EVs) are charged domestically overnight, when the precise timing of power allocation is not important to the user, thus providing a source of flexibility that can be leveraged by charging control algorithms. In this paper, we show that by keeping the EV connected to a standard domestic smart plug every night, it is possible to achieve an approximate 37% annual reduction in carbon intensity compared to uncontrolled charging (based on 2022 UK National Grid data) without compromising the EV owners’ charging demand. For this purpose, we use Model Predictive Control techniques to schedule power delivery with the objective of minimizing grid-average CO2 emissions over forecast windows of multiple sessions (up to seven days ahead). We find that flexibility on the part of EV owners—both their willingness to keep the EV connected at night, and to indicate a precautionary (i.e., upper bound) estimate of their required state-of-charge in the morning—allows for significant emissions reduction and accelerated decarbonization of the mobility sector.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0345748 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 45748&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0345748

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0345748

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().