Utilizing virtual power plants to support main grid for frequency regulation

Abstract

In this paper, a new control architecture of virtual power plants (VPP) is proposed for the frequency regulation (FR) in main grid. Firstly, to address the power prediction of aggregation nodes (AN) with spatio-temporal correlation under VPP, a novel combined model based on graph convolutional networks and bi-directional long and short-term memory is established. Further, considering the effect of prediction uncertainty, a power shortage measurement method based on interval estimation is proposed to determine the effective power of AN. Secondly, a dispatch-based control strategy is introduced to enable VPP to respond to regulation commands from the main grid. Additionally, the influence of transmission line power loss on FR is considered, which can be eliminated by applying the developed power compensation design scheme based on proportional allocation. Finally, numerical simulations illustrate that the proposed method enhances prediction performance by 68.65%, taking mean absolute error as an example, while ensuring the accuracy and reliability of power prediction. Also, the adopted control strategy can effectively utilize VPP to provide FR services for the main grid. Moreover, the application results in a real scene are better than those of benchmark methods, which also demonstrates that the proposed approach has a high practical application potential in power system.