Virtual power plant management in presence of renewable energy resources

Nowadays the number of distributed generation (DG) units especially renewable energy resources (RES) and energy storage systems (ESS) in distribution networks are increasing because of cost saving and depleting fossil fuels. There are a lot of problems faced with controlling such a high amount of information and small supplies of DGs, when these small RESs are connected to power system and are participated in energy market directly. Virtual power plant (VPP), as an aggregation of some DGs with their own local energy management system and some fix and variable loads, is used to solve these problems in association with DGs and networks. All energy managements in virtual power plants have been done without RESs including wind turbine, fuel cell, photo voltaic, and geothermal and ESSs, so, in this publication, the electrical energy management for a VPP considering some RESs and ESSs will be done via three different scenarios, and MATLAB tools will be applied to evaluate the method. In the final scenario, the superiority of applying the proposed energy management method considering RESs in comparison with usual energy management methods in VPP will be shown.