VIRTUS Project: A Scalable Aggregation Platform for the Intelligent Virtual Management of Distributed Energy Resources

Bianchi, Stefano; Filippo, Allegra De; Magnani, Sandro; Mosaico, Gabriele; Silvestro, F.

doi:10.3390/en14123663

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 31 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The energy services will allow the end customer access to the energy market, improving energy efficiency locally and globally and the security of energy supply. The project intends to create a prototype VPP that also allows the integration of the conventional generation of electricity and heat with the network infrastructures and with the supply systems along the entire value chain: the organization of the energy portfolio , the use of forecasting systems, the management of customer relations (Customer Relationship Management-CRM), the adoption of geographic localization systems (Geographic Information System-GIS) and measurement and billing activities [13].…”

Section: Incentives Relating To Thermal Energy Consumptions (Thermal ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

University of Genoa best practices in managing Energy and Climate Change

Massucco

Borghi

Delfino

et al. 2023

IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Since 2011, the University of Genoa (UniGe), Italy, focused on sustainable management of its campuses. In one of them, the Savona Campus, research and projects are specifically focused on Sustainable Energy and Smart City topics. Great efforts were made to reduce the carbon footprint by the creation of two large Research Infrastructures (a Smart Microgrid and an energy self-sufficient building) integrating different renewable energy sources and system automation. These infrastructures allowed to improve the energy performance of the Campus. Several actions have been then carried out also in the Genova Campus, including the implementation of a system for the real-time monitoring of the consumption of electricity for the most energy-intensive buildings. Results permitted to reduce energy consumption and provided significative and practical guidelines for energy saving. In 2015, the UniGe Commission on Environmental Sustainability was created and since then UniGe joined several international sustainability networks, such as ISCN (International Sustainable Campus Network) and UNICA GREEN (Network of Universities from the Capitals of Europe), sharing its best practices with other universities. UniGe is also active member of the Italian Universities’ Network for Sustainable Development (RUS). In 2022 UniGe made a strong and explicit pledge against climate change, defining its Climate Neutrality Strategy 2022-2030. The strategy, starting from its latest UniGe greenhouse gases (GHG) inventory, outlines a path that the university must follow to reduce both direct and indirect emissions and defines the actions to do for the offsetting of residual emissions. This is the last step of the strong and continuous commitment towards the spreading of the sustainability culture in all the Campus activities.

show abstract

Section: Incentives Relating To Thermal Energy Consumptions (Thermal ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

University of Genoa best practices in managing Energy and Climate Change

Massucco

Borghi

Delfino

et al. 2023

IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The need for coordinating the distributed generation in VPPs forces their schedules to be managed as a single plant [77]. This problem can be addressed by using agents and flexible control methods [78]. The key for coordinating such systems is the underlying communication infrastructure.…”

Section: Energy Services Deliverymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors propose a mixed-integer linear programming optimization model for day-ahead optimal energy and reserve dispatch and optimal real-time energy re-dispatch. A VPP that provides software as services for the community or cross-sector services represents a new direction for the future, and the studies on this topic and possible implementations started in the past decade [78]. There are still a lot of unknowns because renewable energy is influenced by the weather, but this topic can help solve the energy demand problems.…”

Section: Energy Services Deliverymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The VPP may provide support for energy autarky by coordinating the energy generation with the storage and the demand so that the local microgrid can work decoupled from the grid [52]. One problem is how to manage the energy demand and the renewable supply in a balanced way so that the exchanges of energy with the main grid are minimized [78] (see Figure 5). The grid can benefit from the power supply stability at the edge, while the VPP can work fully or partially powered by renewable [36].…”

Section: Local Energy Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Virtual Power Plant Optimization in Smart Grids: A Narrative Review

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Virtual power plants (VPPs) are promising solutions to address the decarbonization and energy efficiency goals in the smart energy grid. They assume the coordination of local energy resources such as energy generation, storage, and consumption. They are used to tackle problems brought by the stochastic nature of renewable energy, lack of energy storage devices, or insufficient local energy flexibility on the demand side. VPP modeling, management, and optimization are open to research problems that should consider, on one side, the local constraints in the operation of the energy resources and power flows and the energy grid’s sustainability objectives on the other side. There are multiple goals to create a VPP, such as to deliver energy services on a market or to the grid operator, to operate a microgrid in autonomy decoupled from the main grid, or to sustain local energy communities. In this paper, we present the results of a narrative review carried out on the domain of VPP optimization for the local energy grid integration. We have defined a search strategy that considers highly rated international databases (i.e., Elsevier, IEEE, and MDPI) in a six-year timeframe and applied objective inclusion/exclusion criteria for selecting articles and publications for the review; 95 articles have been analyzed and classified according to their objectives and solutions proposed for optimizing VPP integration in smart grids. The results of the study show that VPP concepts and applications are well addressed in the research literature, however, there is still work to be done on: engaging prosumers and citizens in such a virtual organization, developing heuristics to consider a wider range of local and global constraints and non-energy vectors, and to decentralize and make transparent the services delivery and financial settlement towards community members. This study can help researchers to understand the current directions for VPP integration in smart grids. As a next step we plan to further analyze the open research directions related to this problem and target the development of innovative solutions to allow the integration of multi-energy assets and management of cross energy sector services in energy communities.

show abstract