Optimal management of a virtual power plant

Deregulation of energy market led to the development of flexible and efficient framework for energy trading by energy companies in a competitive environment. Both deregulation and the concern towards environment issues increased the number of small and medium renewable power plants distributed in the network. The variability of renewable energy sources and the lack of their central monitoring led to new challenges concerning power system operation. The idea of aggregation for distributed energy sources led to the concept of virtual power plant, which determines a better control of production units but also a better visibility for the system operator. In this paper, the authors propose an optimal management solution which can offer a virtual power plant the capability to sell complete services, both for production and demand side management, by decreasing the necessary reserve for balance.