Small-scale Thermal Power Units and Energy Storage in Virtual Power Plant

A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is an innovative control technology that combines advanced communication technology and software systems with energy storage systems, and user loads, for unified dispatchs to aggregate and optimize distributed devices, including distributed power generation units, enering and participation in electricity market operations. It is considered an important path for coordinating and optimizing energy supply and achieving carbon neutrality policy in the coordinated development of regional energy systems. In response to the current difficulties in integrating small-scale thermal power units into the grid, this paper proposes a VPP dispatching strategy considering supply and load transfer, with the goal of maximizing the overall profit of the power generation system as the objective function, to enhance the dispatching flexibility of the VPP from the supply side. Electricity storage systems are used to store electrical energy. and participate in dispatching, leveraging the advantages of energy storage. The experimental results show that the participation of energy storage equipment in VPP dispatching significantly improves the economic efficiency of VPP operation, enhances the level of renewable energy consumption, and achieves the effect of regulating the peaks and valleys of the power grid, with good performance in terms of economic efficiency. After the energy storage system participates in VPP regulation, the system's dependence on external power grids is greatly reduced, improving its stability and autonomy while reducing the difficulty of external power grid load regulation.