Optimized integration of charging and battery swapping stations for peak load and cost reduction

Electric vehicles (EVs) hold promises to revolutionize transport decarbonization, but face challenges such as high costs, long charging times, and potential grid overload issues. In this context, battery swapping emerges as a solution, offering scheduled charging, quick replacements, and utilizing station batteries for energy services. This study proposes a methodology to assess the viability of supplying energy services to major consumers through battery swapping stations and applies an optimized management strategy to a case study based on real world data. The integration optimization focuses primarily on operational coordination, specifically peak load balancing and cost minimization, while also addressing technical feasibility and economic viability of combined charging and swapping operations. This ensures that the proposed framework is not only mathematically rigorous but also applicable to real-world EV infrastructure planning. The objective is to optimize the joint operation of a Charging Point Operator (CPO) and a Battery Swapping Station (BSS), focusing on both economic and operational benefits. To this end, a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) framework is employed to model energy balance, grid constraints, and operational limits under real-world conditions. The work highlights the advantages of integrating charging and swapping stations to address challenges in widespread EV adoption, focusing on external charging stations. After a first assessment, which gathers some key data like hourly energy demand, electricity costs and grid fees, a detailed analysis is conducted to identify daily or seasonal trends in demand for a specific case study located in Italy. In addition, the optimization procedure for the case study minimizes the annual energy cost of the charging station. Results show a noteworthy reduction in peak demand and demonstrate that, thanks to the exploitation of the spread in the electricity costs during the day, annual economic savings can reach up to 26 % in total. This underscores the efficacy of a battery swapping system in capitalizing on cost differentials in electricity pricing, thereby contributing to considerable economic benefits but also to relieve the grid peak loads.