With the rapid development of the emerging technologies and significant cost reduction of the deployment for solar energy and wind power, the replacement of traditional power generation by renewable energy becomes feasible in the future. However, different from currently deployed centralized power sources, renewables are categorized as one kind of intermittent energy sources, and the scale of renewables is small and scattered. In the recent literature, the architecture of virtual power plant was proposed to replace the current smart grid in the future. However, the energy sharing concept and the uncertainties of intermittent energy sources will cause the short-term energy management for the virtual power plant much more complicated than the current centralized control energy management for traditional power generation system. We thus propose a hierarchical day-ahead power scheduling system for virtual power plant in this work to tackle the complex short-term energy management problems. We first collect electricity consumption data from smart appliances used in households and predict power-generating capacity of renewable energy sources at the prosumer level. Then, the proposed hierarchical power scheduling system is employed to schedule the usage of electricity for the customers by considering the efficiency of the use of distributed renewables. Notably, charging management of a moving electric vehicle is also considered in the proposed power scheduling mechanism. In addition, a real-time power tracking mechanism is presented to deal with the forecast errors of volatile renewable power generation, electricity load, and moving electric vehicle charging, and the maximal usage of renewables and reduction of the burden on community virtual power plants during time period of peak load can be achieved accordingly. The experimental results show that the proposed day-ahead power scheduling system can mitigate the dependency on traditional power generation effectively, and balance peak and off-peak period load of electricity market.
Short-term forecast of automatic frequency restoration reserve from a renewable energy based virtual power plant
