Virtual Power Plant to Help Integrate Renewable Energy into Grid

July 30th, 2012 by Joshua S Hill

Researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK have created a method for forming virtual power plants that would effectively bring renewable energy from smaller generators into the grid. The formation of such “cooperative virtual power plants” (CVPPs) would use intelligent and multi-agent software systems and include a payment method — also designed by the researchers — to encourage distributed energy resources (DERs) to join CVPPs.

“There is considerable talk about how to integrate a large number of small, renewable sources into the grid in a more efficient and cost effective way, as current feed in tariffs, that simply reward production are expensive and ineffective,” said Dr Valentin Robu, from the University’s Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group, who worked on the study.

“CVPPs that together have a higher total production and, crucially, can average out prediction errors is a promising solution, which does not require expensive additional infrastructure, just intelligent incentives.”

By using a mathematical technique called proper scoring rules (a scoring rule, is a measure of the performance of an entity, be it person or machine, which repeatedly makes decisions under uncertainty), intelligent software agents, representing the individual DERs, are incentivised to report accurate estimates of their electricity production.

The researchers devised a scoring rules-based payment mechanism that incentivises the provision of accurate predictions from the CVPPs – and in turn, the member DERs – which aids in the planning of the supply schedule at the Grid. The mechanism guarantees that DERs are rewarded for providing estimates that are both accurate and have a high confidence, ensuring that software agents are given credit for high probability estimates that are close to the realised ones.

Valentin adds: “Scoring rules with specific incentive properties have long been used to design payment mechanisms that incentivise agents to report private probabilistic predictions truthfully and to the best of their forecasting abilities.

“We show that our mechanism incentivises real DERs to form CVPPs, and outperforms the current state of the art payment mechanism developed for this problem.”

Source: University of Southampton
Image Source: NewEnergyToday on Flickr

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Tags: cooperative, cooperative power plants, CVPP, distributed energy, distributed energy resources, power plants, university of southampton, virtual power plant, virtual power plants

About the Author

Joshua S Hill I'm a Christian, a nerd, a geek, and I believe that we're pretty quickly directing planet-Earth into hell in a handbasket! I also write for Fantasy Book Review (.co.uk), and can be found writing articles for a variety of other sites. Check me out at about.me for more.

http://www.duurzamebrabanders.nl/blog Henk Daalder Windparken Wiki

The german company Siemens has shown something similar, about 10 years ago.
The Netherlands just made the dutch power market work effectively, its now the only part of the dutch energy market that really works
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  Ha, well at least it’s got that.
- Electricity trade
  
  The concept of virtual power plant is real and has been proven to work for some time. What this research is proposing is a new method to design incentives for them to form in a decentralized way, using scoring rules.