Virtual Power Plants Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading in Unbalanced Distribution Networks: A Distributed Robust Approach Against Communication Failures

In recent years, virtual power plants (VPPs) have been undergoing a rapid development to aggregate mushrooming distributed energy resources. In this paper, a distributed robust algorithm for VPPs’ peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading is proposed which can improve the robustness against communication failures such as packet losses and computing node failures in the cyber layer. Firstly, a P2P energy trading framework suitable for VPPs located in the unbalanced distribution network managed by the distribution system operator (DSO) is proposed, which is a bi-level problem with the DSO standing at the higher level to solve the power flow model and VPP operators (VPPOs) following at the lower level to decide the bilateral trading quantity and prices. Herein, an enhanced linearized DistFlow model is developed to address the unbalanced distribution network. Then, a distributed algorithm wherein the DSO and VPPOs engage in an iterative negotiation process based on relaxed alternating direction method of multipliers (R-ADMM) is derived, which renders the VPPOs’ parallel computation and preserves privacy. Furthermore, a robust version of the algorithm against communication failures (DRAACF) is developed. The economy, robustness, computational efficiency and scalability of the proposed approach are validated by simulation analyses based on the modified IEEE 13-bus and IEEE 123-bus distribution networks.