A Centralized-Stochastic Solution for Smart Energy Management in a Virtual Power Plant

Virtual power plant concept creates additional benefits for different stakeholders such as system operators, distributed energy resources owners, and aggregators. This paper presents a smart energy management solution from virtual power plant aggregator point of view. To this end, a network-constrained economic dispatch has been developed taking into account a comprehensive resource portfolio including conventional and renewable distributed generations, energy storage units, and flexible loads. The virtual power plant aggregator aims at minimizing its expected costs through optimal dispatch of its own resources as well as purchasing and selling electricity from/to upstream network. To this end, a stochastic programming approach has been employed to consider the generation uncertainty of renewable energy resources using a set of plausible scenarios. The proposed framework is a mixed-integer linear programming problem and solved by the CPLEX solver in the GAMS software. It is noteworthy that, the effectiveness of the model has been verified considering several numerical studies.