Optimal Electric Bus Depot Charging: Cost Savings, Grid Limits, and Robustness Trade-Offs

Fabio Widmer, Luca Pinter, Mohammad Hossein Moradi, Christopher Harald Onder

Depot charging of electric bus fleets must minimize electricity costs, respect grid limits, and remain feasible despite uncertain trip energy demand. While cost-optimal charging is well studied, its value under different electricity prices and grid connection capacities, as well as the economic cost of robustness, remain poorly quantified. We address these gaps with a convex robust formulation in which bounded demand uncertainty is enforced through worst-case state-of-energy constraints. The formulation is evaluated against charge-on-arrival using realistic service schedules for four Swiss depots containing 7-35 buses. In the depots studied, smaller depots achieve the greatest relative benefit from optimization, with total electricity cost reductions exceeding 50%, because optimization mitigates charging peaks that strongly affect their costs. For all depot sizes, the savings from optimization increase with electricity price volatility. Optimization can also lower the grid capacity required for feasible operation by over 40%, although tight limits reduce peak shaving potential. Protection against energy-demand deviations of 10% increases total electricity cost by less than 0.1%. The resulting charging power profiles exhibit interpretable price-threshold and peak-shaping behavior, providing practical guidance for real-world implementations.