Hierarchical Decentralized Management for Virtual Power Plants using Real-time Pricing Strategy

This paper considers a hierarchical decentralized management of virtual power plants. Virtual power plants serve as aggregator of energy resources, including generators, storage and controllable loads, to support their balancing market integration. A virtual power plant becomes a largescale distributed system having a large number of power equipment, and a centralized management methodology may not be suitable for its operation. We investigate the real-time pricing strategy and individual optimization by each participants. The proposed hierarchical decentralized management methodology can mitigate the effects of uncertainties in the power generation and load profiles and allow plug-and-play type operation of power equipment. The effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical decentralized management methodology is evaluated through numerical experiments of the virtual power plant consisting 58 power equipment.