scholarly journals The Concept, Project and Current Status of Virtual Power Plant: A Review

2022 ◽  
Vol 2152 (1) ◽  
pp. 012059
Author(s):  
Jiatong Zhang

Abstract Due to technological advancements in recent years, distributed energy resources (DER) applications have become more prevalent in households and businesses, including various renewable energy applications. While the virtual power plant (VPP) can integrate energy storage, flexible loads and DER, etc., it can support the power grid operating stability and security. Therefore, more and more researchers give their attention to VPP and advise on their optimization. This paper states the VPP concept from other researchers’ studies and provides a detailed explanation. Meanwhile, some typical VPP projects worldwide are also presented. In addition, some potential challenges and future development advice in the VPP studies are also presented.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 3814
Author(s):  
Poushali Pal ◽  
Parvathy Ayalur Krishnamoorthy ◽  
Devabalaji Kaliaperumal Rukmani ◽  
S. Joseph Antony ◽  
Simon Ocheme ◽  
...  

Renewable energy sources prevail as a clean energy source and their penetration in the power sector is increasing day by day due to the growing concern for climate action. However, the intermittent nature of the renewable energy based-power generation questions the grid security, especially when the utilized source is solar radiation or wind flow. The intermittency of the renewable generation can be met by the integration of distributed energy resources. The virtual power plant (VPP) is a new concept which aggregates the capacities of various distributed energy resources, handles controllable and uncontrollable loads, integrates storage devices and empowers participation as an individual power plant in the electricity market. The VPP as an energy management system (EMS) should optimally dispatch the power to its consumers. This research work is proposed to analyze the optimal scheduling of generation in VPP for the day-ahead market framework using the beetle antenna search (BAS) algorithm under various scenarios. A case study is considered for this analysis in which the constituting energy resources include a photovoltaic solar panel (PV), micro-turbine (MT), wind turbine (WT), fuel cell (FC), battery energy storage system (BESS) and controllable loads. The real-time hourly load curves are considered in this work. Three different scenarios are considered for the optimal dispatch of generation in the VPP to analyze the performance of the proposed technique. The uncertainties of the solar irradiation and the wind speed are modeled using the beta distribution method and Weibull distribution method, respectively. The performance of the proposed method is compared with other evolutionary algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the genetic algorithm (GA). Among these above-mentioned algorithms, the proposed BAS algorithm shows the best scheduling with the minimum operating cost of generation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 75-91
Author(s):  
Qing Yang ◽  
Hao Wang ◽  
Taotao Wang ◽  
Shengli Zhang ◽  
Xiaoxiao Wu ◽  
...  

The advent of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as distributed renewables, energy storage, electric vehicles, and controllable loads, brings a significantly disruptive and transformational impact on the centralized power system. It is widely accepted that a paradigm shift to a decentralized power system with bidirectional power flow is necessary to the integration of DERs. The virtual power plant (VPP) emerges as a promising paradigm for managing DERs to participate in the power system. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based VPP energy management platform to facilitate a rich set of transactive energy activities among residential users with renewables, energy storage, and flexible loads in a VPP. Specifically, users can interact with each other to trade energy for mutual benefits and provide network services, such as feed-in energy, reserve, and demand response, through the VPP. To respect the users’ independence and preserve their privacy, we design a decentralized optimization algorithm to optimize the users’ energy scheduling, energy trading, and network services. Then we develop a prototype blockchain network for VPP energy management and implement the proposed algorithm on the blockchain network. By experiments using real-world data trace, we validated the feasibility and e_ectiveness of our algorithm and the blockchain system. The simulation results demonstrate that our blockchain-based VPP energy management platform reduces the users’ cost by up to 38.6% and reduces the overall system cost by 11.2%.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 1242
Author(s):  
Rakshith Subramanya ◽  
Matti Yli-Ojanperä ◽  
Seppo Sierla ◽  
Taneli Hölttä ◽  
Jori Valtakari ◽  
...  

Primary frequency reserves in Northern Europe have traditionally been provided with hydro plants and fossil fuel-burning spinning reserves. Recently, smart distributed energy resources have been equipped with functionality needed to participate on frequency reserves. Key categories of such resources include photovoltaic systems, batteries, and smart loads. Most of these resources are small and cannot provide the minimum controllable power required to participate on frequency reserves. Thus, virtual power plants have been used to aggregate the resources and trade them on the frequency reserves markets. The information technology aspects of virtual power plants are proprietary and many of the details have not been made public. The first contribution of this article is to propose a generic data model and application programming interface for a virtual power plant with the above-mentioned capabilities. The second contribution is to use the application programming interface to cope with the unpredictability of the frequency reserve capacity that the photovoltaic systems and other distributed energy resources are able to provide to the frequency reserves markets in the upcoming bidding period. The contributions are demonstrated with an operational virtual power plant installation at a Northern European shopping center, aggregating photovoltaic Primary Frequency Reserves resources.


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