Offering Strategy of a Price-Maker Virtual Power Plant

This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic model for the offering strategy of a price-maker virtual power plant (VPP) participating in energy and reserve electricity markets. The VPP comprises a renewable generating unit, a conventional power plant, and a flexible demand. The VPP aims at maximizing its expected profit and is able to modify market prices by strategically participating in the two considered markets. The problem is formulated as a bi-level model, whose upper level represents the offering and operating decisions of the VPP, while the lower level represents the clearing of the energy and reserve markets. The uncertainty in the renewable production and the requests of the system operator to deploy reserves is modeled using a set of scenarios. Results from a case study are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach and show that the VPP increases its profit by behaving strategically in comparison with the case in which the VPP behaves as a price-taker.