Electrical energy management of virtual power plants in distribution networks with renewable energy resources and energy storage systems

Production of energy in centralized power plants and transmitted via transmission lines to the customers is always with high power losses. Distributed generation (DG) especially renewable energy resources (RES) and energy storage systems (ESS) through distributed system are very cost saving and sometimes inevitable. If these small DGs want to connect to power system and participate in energy market directly, both distribution and energy market would have many problems with control such a high amount of information and small supplies of DGs. Application of virtual power plant (VPP) as an aggregation of some DGs with own local energy management system and some fix and variable loads is a suitable solution for DGs and networks problems. VPP has a main energy management too. So they can be in contact with distribution system operator and each local energy management systems of each DCs via main energy management system, so the VPP can make decisions when and which and how much each DCs supply. In the other hand random type of electrical productions of RESs and also shortage of energy at peak load times and necessity of energy storage make electrical energy management more complicated. All energy managements in virtual power plants were without RESs and ESSs so in this publication electrical energy management for a VPP with considering some RESs and ESSs will be done via three different scenarios and MATLAB tools was applied to evaluate the units control dispatch to the optimal system configuration.