Operational scheduling of Virtual Power Plants in the presence of energy storages and demand response programs for participating in the energy market

The Virtual Power Plant (VPP) concept is developed in order to improve handling and visibility of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) for system operators and other market players by making an appropriate interface among these system components. Using this concept, DERs could be considered as a substitution for Conventional Power Plants (CPPs) in both forms of production energy and capacity. In this paper, an operational model for optimal day ahead electrical and thermal scheduling of a VPP for participating in the energy market is proposed where participation of energy storage systems and demand response programs are also taken into account. The proposed model is tested on a large scale VPP composed of various types of DERs and is solved using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solver XPRESS under GAMS software. The results demonstrated that implementation of demand response programs would decrease total operation costs of VPP as well as its dependency on the upstream network.