Optimal Energy Management for Virtual Power Plant Considering Operation and Degradation Costs of Energy Storage System and Generators

Even though generating electricity from Renewable Energy (RE) and electrification of transportation with Electric Vehicles (EVs) can reduce climate change impacts, uncertainties of the RE and charged demand of EVs are significant challenges for energy management in power systems. To deal with this problem, this paper proposes an optimal energy management method using the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) concept for the power system considering solar PhotoVoltaics (PVs) and Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCS). The Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is applied to manage energy in the power system to minimize the operation cost of generators and degradation costs in Energy Storage Systems (ESS) and generators. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is examined and tested on the IEEE 24 bus Reliability Test System (RTS 24) using the MATPOWER tool on the MATLAB program for calculating Optimal Power Flow (OPF). In this study, two situations before and after applying the proposed method are considered. The simulation results demonstrate that a branch constraint violation occurs before using optimal energy management using the VPP concept. In order to solve this issue, the DE algorithm for optimal energy management using the VPP concept is applied by dividing the studied case into two subcases as follows. For the first subcase, two objectives consisting of the minimization of the generator operation cost and the minimization of the battery degradation cost in ESS are considered. In the second case, three objectives comprising the two mentioned objectives with the minimization of generator degradation cost are considered. The results demonstrate that branch constraint violations can be avoided by applying optimal energy management using the VPP concept. This study also suggests considering the generator degradation cost in the objective function, which can minimize the total costs by 7.06% per day compared with the total cost of the first case.