An agent based approach for Virtual Power Plant valuing thermal flexibility in energy markets

Virtual Power Plant (VPP) defines a combination of Distributed Energy Resources, seen as a single entity from a market point of view which aims maximizing its profit according to different business cases. This paper introduces a VPP concept based on an optimization on top of Real Time Control approach using a market-based Multi Agent System (MAS) which controls the flexibility of electricity and heat demand and supply using a dynamic pricing as steering signal. The peculiarity of this approach is to derive the thermal constraints of the optimization from the market bids rather than from thermal models. This reduces all the thermal constraints to a single constraint, leading to a faster optimization, that scales well with the number of houses and which can be executed often to minimize the impact of forecast and model uncertainties. In this paper, a 50 households VPP simulation has been implemented and shows significant cost savings potential.