Traction grids are oversized and underutilized high-power infrastructures that currently cater only to their vehicles. However, they can become flexible backbones to the city grid as multi-functional grids with integrated renewables, energy storage, and third-party loads such as EV chargers.
Batteries are a key, linking piece in this multi-functional ecosystem, allowing the harvesting of braking energy, storage of renewable generation, peak shaving of power demands, and the reduction of voltage drops, among others. This project enables the successful integration of batteries in traction grids by 1) a highly efficient multi-port converter to connect batteries and other elements to traction grids and 2) a suitable energy management scheme to dispatch the battery and the other sources and loads.