Modeling, Simulation, and Techno-economic Analysis of a Virtual Power Plant: A Case Study in the Perspective of Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh, a developing country in the South Asia facing severe load shedding problem due to high density of population and energy crisis. In comparison to all other energy sources, fossil fuels account for the majority of electricity production in this country. Due to lack of smart distribution of energy, the country unable to meets the demand of electricity. Therefore, this research has been taken virtual power plant (VPP) as a solution to develop smart energy distribution system in the country. Basically, VPP can be termed as a combination of distributed generators (DGs), energy storage systems, regulated loads etc., which operated by an energy management system (EMS) in order to control the distributed generation, and improve its exposure in the power markets. Right now, VPP has widely contributing in European and American energy markets, but Bangladesh has yet to introduce it as a new technology for more efficient energy delivery. Due to the shortage of resources, it requires a comprehensive study to investigate the implementation strategy of such kind of technology in perspective of Bangladesh. The main consideration of this work is cost reduction and reliability enhancement of energy delivery. For the case study of Bangladesh, a VPP model is designed for a university campus named IIUC campus, and the developed system is capable of sharing power to the grid. The whole system is controlled by control coordination center (CCC) which is developed by using a logic algorithm. The VPP design and simulations are carried out by using MATLAB –SIMULINK 2016a environment. Finally, the techno-economic analysis is done to compare its effectiveness with respective to the existing system. Results show that the designed VPP-based energy management system reduces about 53% cost with respect to the existing energy distribution system. The VPP technology can be an effective means for the energy management system of Bangladesh.