Sonia Martin
Stanford University
soniamartin@stanford.edu
Bio
Sonia Martin is a PhD candidate in the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab, advised by Prof. Ram Rajagopal. Her research centers around electric vehicles (EVs) and their integration with the electricity grid. Specifically, she designs optimization algorithms both for EV charging and residential battery storage operation to reduce emissions, costs, and grid infrastructure upgrades from increased EV adoption. Sonia received her M.S. from Stanford University in 2022 and B.S. from UC Berkeley in 2020.
Areas of Research
- Electromagnetics and Energy
Optimizing software defined battery systems for transformer protection
Residential electric vehicle charging causes large spikes in electricity demand that risk violating neighborhood transformer power limits. Battery energy storage systems reduce these transformer limit violations, but operating them individually is not cost-optimal. Instead of individual optimization, aggregating, or sharing, these batteries leads to cost-optimal performance, but homeowners must relinquish battery control. Our work leverages virtualization to propose battery sharing optimization schemes to reduce electricity costs, extend the lifetime of a residential transformer, and maintain homeowner control over the battery. A case study with simulated home loads, solar generation, and electric vehicle charging profiles demonstrates that joint, or shared, optimization reduces consumer bills by 56% and transformer aging by 48% compared to individual optimization. Hybrid and dynamic optimization schemes that provide owners with autonomy have similar transformer aging reduction but are slightly less cost-effective. These results suggest that controlling shared batteries with virtualization is an effective way to delay transformer upgrades in the face of growing residential electric vehicle charging penetration.