Is micro-CHP price controllable under price signal controlled Virtual Power Plants?

As micro-combined heat and power (micro-CHP) systems move towards mass deployment together with other kinds of distributed energy resources (DER), an increasing emphasis has been placed on how to coordinate such a large diversified DER portfolio in an efficient way by the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) like aggregators. Compared to the centralized direct control scheme, a decentralized control scheme “control-by-price” is proposed for the VPP operation. The corresponding scheme has advantages in scalability, transparency and simplicity. In this context, a short term economic analysis is conducted for three different micro-CHP systems to investigate the feasibility of being controlled by price. Such analysis is relevant for both controller designs for micro-CHP systems and VPP related operations. The results indicate that controlling the micro-CHP systems by price is feasible but could result in jumpy responses.