Optimal Price Menu Design of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations providing Demand Response

The proliferation of Electric Vehicles (EVs) creates new challenges for EV Charging Station Operators (CSOs) due to the increasing charging demand, but also opportunities to leverage EV user flexibility. In this work, we consider an EV CSO offering several charging power rates at different prices, and we explore the design of a price menu. In our setting, EV users are inflexible in their parking duration but flexible in terms of their energy demand, and choose the option that maximizes their welfare, i.e., their utility minus their cost of charging. We formulate the optimal price menu design problem of a profit maximizing CSO as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming problem, and we compare against the outcome of social welfare maximization. We further account for the provision of demand response by the CSO, i.e., lowering its power consumption for a certain period given a certain price for remuneration, by adjusting the price menu (in real time), so as to incent EV users to choose lower power rates. Our numerical demonstrations provide useful insights on the construction of the optimal price menu.