Review of operations for multi-energy coupled virtual power plants participating in electricity market

Abstract

The application projects of traditional virtual power plants generally have some significant problems, such as single energy structure, insufficient participation in the market, sparse energy coupling relationship and lack of new loads, which lead to poor operation stability, low economic benefits and difficult risk management of traditional virtual power plants. With the development of distributed energy resources such as electric vehicles, air conditioners, and electric heating loads and the advancement of information and communication technologies, virtual power plants have gradually evolved from aggregating a single type of energy resource to having the ability to meet the aggregation and management of multiple types of energy resources. Virtual power plant technology provides an effective means to aggregate distributed energy and user-side resources to participate in energy market transactions. A virtual power plant with multiple energy sources such as electricity, heat and gas coupling can effectively avoid the lack of system stability and security caused by a single resource structure, and effectively meet the needs of users for multiple types of energy. This paper focuses on multi-energy coupled virtual power plants, summarizes the current status of research on multi-energy coupled virtual power plants participating in power market operation from the aspects of multi-energy coupling mechanism and operation optimization in power market, and finally provides an outlook on the research direction of multi-energy coupled virtual power plants.