An Auction-Based Local Market Clearing for Energy Management in a Virtual Power Plant

Virtual power plant (VPP) concept creates additional benefits for different stakeholders, such as system operators, distributed energy resources’ owners, and aggregators. This article presents an auction-based energy management solution from VPP aggregator point of view. To this end, a network-constrained economic dispatch has been developed taking into account a comprehensive resource portfolio, including the conventional and renewable distributed generations, energy storage units, and flexible loads. The VPP 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 as well as day-ahead energy market prices using a set of plausible scenarios. The payments to the prosumers are according to an auction-based pricing method that could be an efficient strategy for the VPP aggregator in order to guarantee fairness among consumers and producers within the VPP. In the auction-based pricing scheme, the electricity price at each local node can be calculated according to the demand and generation in each time slot. 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.