Date of Award
August 2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Energy Systems Engineering
First Advisor
Prakash P. Ranganathan
Abstract
The electric power grid is transitioning from centralized generation toward a distributed, renewable-heavy architecture in which millions of electric vehicles (EVs) must be integrated as active, bidirectional grid resources. The technologies that enable this integration, namely hybrid energy storage, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) exchange, demand forecasting, and dispatch optimization, have matured in isolation and have not been validated as an interdependent system operating at the grid. This dissertation proposes and validates the Secure Intelligent Reliable Energy (SIRE) framework, which organizes EV integration around three interdependent pillars: Interoperability, Intelligence, and Integrity. Five studies test these pillars. The interoperability pillar establish, through systematic review and techno-economic analysis, that hybrid storage and bidirectional V2G constitute a viable distributed resource, and identify coordination, cross-standard interoperability, battery degradation, and cybersecurity as the conditions governing that viability. The intelligence pillar, using the U.S. Department of Energy California charging dataset, show that ensemble machine learning sustains high predictive accuracy (R^2 > 0.84) across pre-COVID, onset-of-COVID, and post-COVID eras despite a statistically significant structural break in user behavior; that charger-type-specific modeling is a prerequisite for reliable Level 2 versus Level 3 forecasting; and that a privacy-preserving Federated Random Forest can be trained on commodity hardware while keeping raw charging data local. The integrity pillar develops a unified, feasibility-guaranteed optimization formulation, solved by hierarchical decomposition, that reduces daily operating cost by 64.2-87.3% and secure resilience under N-2 Contingency as a structural property of conservative resource sizing across four IEEE benchmark networks. This dissertation unifies the three independent pillars and provides the validation of the SIRE framework. Coordinated dispatch outperforms uncoordinated V2G on every network, and on smaller systems uncoordinated bidirectional discharge raises cost above an unmanaged baseline rather than lowering it. Distributed EV integration therefore succeeds only when interoperability, intelligence, and integrity pillars operate as one coordinated system, offering a scalable blueprint for a stable, secure, and decarbonized grid.
Recommended Citation
Prabhakara Rao, Sriram, "Secure Intelligent Reliable Energy (SIRE): A Framework For Electric Vehicles As Distributed Grid Resources" (2026). Theses and Dissertations. 13903.
https://commons.und.edu/theses/13903