  Building sector is the largest energy user in the United States. Conventional
building energy studies mostly involve Heating, Ventilation, and Air
Conditioning (HVAC), and lighting energy consumptions. Recent additions of
solar Photovoltaics (PV) along with other Distributed Energy Resources (DER),
particularly Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEV) have added a new dimension to this
problem and made it more complex. This paper presents an avant-garde framework
for selecting the best charging/discharging level of PEV for a commercial
building-integrated microgrid. A typical commercial building is used as a
microgrid testbed incorporating all the DERs presented in a smart building. A
Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem is formulated to optimize the
energy and demand cost associated with this building operation. The cost
function is solved in conjunction with real data and modified to assess the
bidirectional PEV impacts on the flexible building loads that are contributing
factors in making energy usage decisions. Finally, the impacts of optimized
DERs are investigated on a Distribution System (DS) to show the necessity of a
holistic approach for selecting the suitable PEV strategies. The results show
that bidirectional fast PEV activities can provide higher cost reduction and
less voltage deviation in comparison to slow PEV activities.
