Multi-period dynamic tariffs for prosumers participating in virtual power plants

Abstract

The increasing penetration of prosumers, residential customers equipped with distributed energy resources (DER), offers an opportunity to aggregate DER into virtual power plants (VPP) operated as a single dispatchable resource. Yet that raises the question of how to financially reward prosumers for participating in VPPs. Against this backdrop, this paper explores multi-period dynamic export tariffs based on the dual variables of the optimisation problem used for aggregation. In contrast to the existing approaches, we use a multi-period optimisation model to account for inter-temporal coupling introduced by battery storage systems. We focus on three different VPP models with different objective functions, reflecting varying levels of customer focus. Our analysis is illustrated in a case study, underlying outcome and economic benefits of each VPP model.