Coordinated Operation Strategy for a Virtual Power Plant with Multiple DER Aggregators

This article proposes a coordinated operation strategy for a virtual power plant (VPP) with multiple DER aggregators under the wholesale energy and regulation service market. Considering the market clearing process, VPP operation profit, and DER aggregators' interests, a tri-layer hierarchical framework for VPP is developed to formulate the bidding plans to the superordinate market operator and the dynamic price incentive curves for the subordinate DER owners cooperatively. By using the discrete price quota curves, big-M method, KKT optimal conditions, and strong duality theorem, the tri-layer problem is transformed into an equivalent and tractable mixed integer linear programming problem. Case study with the 141-bus system is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The advantages of lower cost with operation security guarantee and higher flexibility are demonstrated by comparing with other models.