Virtual power plant functionalities Demonstrations in a large laboratory for distributed energy resources

Future scenarios of having a large share of renewable energies and distributed generators in electric power supply require an active participation of these units in system operation in order to guarantee secure power supply. This paper considers the aggregation concept of a virtual power plant to directly control distributed energy units with regard to active and reactive power. The large DeMoTec laboratory at ISET is used for demonstrating the capabilities of providing ancillary services by Distributed Energy Resources (DER). One experiment is presented demonstrating optimized reactive power supply by distributed generators with the objective to minimize network congestions and operational costs.