Unlocking electric vehicle flexibility in microgrids via lightweight on-charger coordination

Uncoordinated electric vehicle charging drives extreme peak demand and grid congestion, severely compromising microgrid stability and economics. To address this challenge, as the interface between vehicles and grids, on-board chargers hold the potential to be transformed into intelligent agents that actively balance microgrid constraints with mobility requirements. However, existing distributed schemes impose prohibitive computational and communication burdens on these resource-constrained edge chargers. Here, we propose a lightweight distributed coordination framework that embeds edge intelligence directly into on-board chargers for autonomous schedule optimization. Validated on a high-fidelity hardware-in-the-loop platform simulating complex microgrid cyber-physical dynamics, our framework reduces memory consumption by 96.1% and communication overhead by 74.3% compared to traditional schemes. Moreover, unlocking this hardware-level flexibility achieves a 10.8% profit increase over the status quo. Importantly, the proposed framework promises profound economic, environmental, and social benefits for the future energy landscape.