Performance-Integrated Virtual Power Plant Management in the Frequency Regulation Market

Renewable integration in power systems causes a surge of frequency fluctuations, primarily due to the intermittent nature of renewable energy. To address this challenge, distributed energy resources (DERs) pave one promising way for frequency regulation by their aggregation as a virtual power plant (VPP). For a VPP participating in the frequency regulation market, its regulation performance is critical for interaction with the system operator. This paper explores a performance-integrated management scheme for a VPP to optimize the utilization of heterogeneous DERs in the frequency regulation market. The relationship between the regulation performance and the DER reserve portfolio is first revealed through a data-driven method, which has rarely been studied in current work. This facilitates the integration of the mapped frequency regulation performance into the aggregation and disaggregation processes in the VPP management. Furthermore, in the aggregation process, the VPP’s feasible operation region associated with the high-dimensional variables and constraints is characterized through a cluster-based aggregation method. Given the massive heterogeneous DERs, this proposed method ensures satisfactory accuracy within the reduced computation time by efficiently capturing the representative DER characteristics. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified using real-world DER data from the Dataport database.