  The increasing trend of transportation electrification presents investors the
opportunity to provide charging services to Electric Vehicle (EV) owners via
the energy purchased from the wholesale electricity market. This will benefit
EV owners with the availability of competitive rates compared to the regulated
utility time-of-use (TOU) rates. The fundamental questions addressed in this
paper are 1) will EV owners benefit from the additional choice of Electric
Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCSs) compared to home charging? 2) is there any
profitable market opportunity for charging stations while the retail
electricity market is regulated? To this end, the strategic bidding problem for
EVCSs which purchase electricity from the Day-Ahead Electricity Market (DAM)
and sell it to EV owners is presented. The strategic bidding problem is
constrained by the market-clearing problem within the DAM as well as EVs'
charging cost minimization problem. A bi-level optimization problem formulation
and a solution method are presented to address this work's research questions.
The effectiveness of the proposed structure in gaining profit for EVCSs is
illustrated, and it is shown that EV owners also save on their charging cost
with the presence of EVCSs as a choice.
