The increasing popularity and number of electric vehicles (EVs) globally have resulted in a growing demand for efficient, reliable, and effective electric vehicle charging station (EVCS) infrastructure. However, the development and implementation of this infrastructure involves various challenges, including the variety of EVs, charging and battery technologies, high installation costs, limited grid capacity, and uncertainties regarding future demand, and raises issues regarding the quality, security, and stability of the power system. This paper presents a holistic understanding of the challenges, mitigation approaches, and available technologies and protocols related to EVCS network deployment. Moreover, optimization strategies such as location planning, network integration, scheduling charging time, and planning price, which involve maximizing the utilization of charging stations and minimizing associated costs, and their modeling techniques are highlighted. This review aims to provide insights to develop sustainable, efficient EVCS infrastructure while overcoming the challenges and optimizing the benefits.

Electric vehicles (EV) are becoming increasingly popular due to their efficiency and potentials to reduce greenhouse gas emission. However, penetration of a very large number of EVs can have negative impacts on power systems. This study proposes optimal vehicle-to-grid (V2G) models to incorporate the EV penetration by minimizing multiple objectives including the peak demand, the variance of load profile, the battery degradation cost and the EV charging/discharging cost based on real-time pricing (RTP). The proposed models incorporate EV driving patterns including driving distance, driving periods, and charging/discharging levels and locations. A nonlinear battery degradation cost function is linearized and incorporated into the optimal models. In addition, a distributed control algorithm is developed to implement the optimal models. One-day simulation results show that the proposed approach can reduce the peak demand and the variance of the load profile by 7.8% and 81.9%, which can significantly improve power system stability and energy efficiency. In addition, the sum of EV charging/discharging cost and battery degradation cost is decreased from $251 to -$153. In fact, 100 EVs earn $153 in the day from the V2G program. The approaches can be used by a load aggregator or a utility to effectively incorporate EV penetration to power systems to unlock V2G opportunities and mitigate negative impacts.

As a key component of transportation decarbonization, the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is rapidly increasing. However, EV batteries are typically retired once their state of health drops to around 80%, usually after 10 to 20 years of use. Despite this decline, retired EV batteries still retain 70–80% of their original capacity. Reusing these retired batteries as second-life batteries (SLBs) for battery energy storage systems can offer significant economic and environmental benefits. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the technical challenges and solutions, economic feasibility, environmental impacts, and case studies of existing projects. It also explores the current battery recycling process. The article concludes with an overview of the feasibility assessment, future development trends, market potential, and policy recommendations for the battery energy storage market.