Architecture Design of Virtual Power Plant Based on “Three Flow Separation-Convergence”

Abstract

With the increase of new energy penetration, the power balance and frequency stability problems brought by its randomness, intermittency and volatility has become increasingly serious. It is difficult to cope with these problems only by traditional centralized power plants. Flexible resources in the power systems should also bear a part of the responsibility for the balance of power and energy. Virtual power plant (VPP) can aggregate a large number of distributed flexible resources with different characteristics, participate in the electricity markets as a whole and accept the dispatch of the grid, and provide important support for the real-time power balance of the power systems. The development of VPPs should be based on a large number of flexible resources, advanced communication and dispatching/control technologies, and efficient business models and good market policies. The operation of VPPs can be attributed to the energy flow of the energy network, the information interaction of the information network and the value transfer of the value network. Therefore, based on the three-layer network architeciture of “energy-information-value”, the operation modes and control schemes of different types of VPPs were analyzed, and the idea of “three flow separation-convergence” for VPP architecture design was proposed. The findings provide useful guidance for the design, construction and operation of VPPs.

Keywords

• new energy
• new power system
• virtual power plant (vpp)
• electricity market
• energy flow
• information flow
• value flow