Energy management of virtual power plant considering distributed generation sizing and pricing

Abstract

The energy management of virtual power plants faces some fundamental challenges that make it complicated compared to conventional power plants, such as uncertainty in production, consumption, energy price, and availability of network components. Continuous monitoring and scaling of network gain status, using smart grids provides valuable instantaneous information about network conditions such as production, consumption, power lines, and network availability. Therefore, by creating a bidirectional communication between the energy management system and the grid users such as producers or energy applicants, it will afford a suitable platform to develop more efficient vector of the virtual power plant. The paper is treated with optimal sizing of DG units and the price of their electricity sales to achieve security issues and other technical considerations in the system. The ultimate goal in this study to determine the active demand power required to increase system loading capability and to withstand disturbances. The effect of different types of DG units in simulations is considered and then the efficiency of each equipment such as converters, wind turbines, electrolyzers, etc., is achieved to minimize the total operation cost and losses, improve voltage profiles, and address other security issues and reliability. The simulations are done in three cases and compared with HOMER software to validate the ability of proposed model.