Balancing wind power with virtual power plants of micro-CHPs

Higher participation levels of wind power in power systems will increase the need for flexible back-up generation to balance the differences between predicted and realized wind power production. This is often an expensive solution. With distributed energy resources and more ICT at the demand side, novel, and possibly cheaper, ways for imbalance minimization arise. Micro combined heat-and-power (micro-CHP) is a novel domestic-level generation technology, producing heat and power simultaneously. Clusters of micro-CHPs can function as flexible virtual power plants (VPPs). This paper presents the design of an online coordination scheme that can substantially reduce the imbalance volumes and the associated costs for wind power traders by actively controlling a VPP comprising micro-CHP systems. It is shown that the imbalance volume and associated cost can be reduced by 73 % and 38 %, respectively.