Pricing and Electric Vehicle Charging Equilibria

Abstract

We study equilibria in an Electric Vehicle (EV) charging game, a cost minimization game inherent to decentralized charging control strategy for EV power demand management. In our model, each user optimizes its total cost which is sum of direct power cost and the indirect dissatisfaction cost. We show that, taking player specific price independent dissatisfaction cost into account, contrary to popular belief, herding only happens at lower EV uptake. Moreover, this is true for both linear and logistic dissatisfaction functions. We study the question of existence of price profiles to induce a desired equilibrium. We define two types of equilibria, distributed and non-distributed equilibria, and show that under logistic dissatisfaction, only non-distributed equilibria are possible by feasibly setting prices. In linear case, both type of equilibria are possible but price discrimination is necessary to induce distributed equilibria. Finally, we show that in the case of symmetric EV users, mediation cannot improve upon Nash equilibria.

Keywords: Electric Vehicles, Pricing, Nash equilibrium, Coarse correlated equilibrium, Mediation, Herding, Dissatisfaction cost

JEL Classification: C61, C72, D4, D11, D82