Improved Feeder Flow Control Method for a Virtual Power Plant With Various Resources to Reduce Communication Dependency

The concept of a virtual power plant (VPP) was introduced for supporting market participation of small-scale renewable energy-based generators (REGs). In a VPP, energy storage systems (ESSs) and micro-turbine-based generators (MTGs) are used together to mitigate the variability of the output of REGs. To keep the output of a VPP at the contracted value in a market, centralized feeder flow control (FFC) methods can be adopted for the VPP. However, conventional centralized FFC methods lack careful consideration of different characteristics of various resources and require high-speed communications and several central control units. Therefore, this paper proposes a new FFC method considering various characteristics of resources and enabling operation with less communication dependency. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by comparing the results of the proposed method with those of the conventional method with performance analysis, stability analysis, and simulations with Simulink/MATLAB.