Modeling Demand Flexibility of RES-based Virtual Power Plants

Abstract

In this paper, an approach to evaluate the benefits of demand flexibility for Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) is presented. The flexible demands chosen in this study are part of a renewable energy source-based VPP that participates in Day-Ahead Market (DAM) and Intra-Day Market (IDM) and has dispatchable and non-dispatchable assets. A demand model with bi-level flexibility is proposed: the first level is associated with DAM, whereas the second level is related to IDM sessions. Simulations are carried out considering a 12-node network to ascertain the eventual impacts of modeling demand flexibility on VPP operation. The market structure considered in the case study resembles the different trading floors in the Spanish electricity market. Results obtained show that the proposed demand flexibility scheme increases the overall profit of the VPP, as well as the revenues of the demand owners without disrupting the consumer's comfort.

Optimal Participation of Heterogeneous, RES-Based Virtual Power Plants in Energy Markets

“…In this work, a novel participation of flexible demands in a VPP is presented. It comprises two levels of flexibility, which are linked with the DAM and IDM market sessions, as formulated below [34]. The assumptions considered while developing this model are based on feedback from Spanish distribution companies and retailers that are in constant interaction with customers.…”

Direct Participation of Dynamic Virtual Power Plants in Secondary Frequency Control

“…These two tasks are implemented into a hierarchical scheme decoupled in time. Optimal energy management of the DVPP, both from an internal point of view and for participation to markets is performed by an optimization function which is solved with a slow periodicity (a few minutes) [9,21,22]. Notice that this optimization stage also provides the deloading margins for each RES generator of the DVPP.…”

“…The global contribution of the work is thus to provide a robust dynamic control which allows one to easily integrate the DVPP in actual frameworks. More specifically, the proposed approach is compliant-in the sense that it is part of a hierarchical time-decoupling strategy which includes all actions from primary to secondary controls-with the standard SFC control for classic generators and also with the static optimization level proposed for the DVPP in [9,21,22] (and further developed in forthcoming papers) for optimal energy and profit run of the DVPP at both the local and energy market participation levels.…”