Technical, economical and regulatory aspects of Virtual Power Plants

With the growing energy consumption in the world, new technologies will influence the way we produce, distribute and consume energy. Beside others, decentralized energy generation becomes a major trend in many countries. Wind converters, fuel cells, bio mass units, micro turbines and combined heat and power units belong to these new and innovative generation technologies. New concepts like virtual power plants can support an improved integration of decentralized generators into electrical networks. Virtual power plants are combinations of a number of decentralized generators and controllable loads which are supervised and optimized by a decentralized energy management system. This paper will present a technical concept for virtual power plants using the latest software technology. It will show that the owner and the operator of these virtual power plants can obtain a sustainable technical, economical and ecological benefit. It discusses some regulatory aspects influencing the competitiveness of virtual power plants in a deregulated market environment based on the basis of the German example.