An Overview of Virtual Power Plant Development from the Perspective of Market Participation

As an energy management mode for aggregating and unified control for multiple distributed energy resources and demands, the concept of Virtual Power Plant (VPP) emphasizes more on their external characteristics which is evidenced by the fact that many of the existing studies about VPP are related to market participation. Therefore, this article will focus on summarizing VPP participation in various types of power market. In terms of market in different time-scale, this paper compares the characteristics and demands from the Medium Term Market (MTM) to the Real Time Market (RTM). Moreover, different target of VPP in the Energy Market (EM) and Ancillary Service Market (ASM) are also displayed. Furthermore, three types of combined market are carefully analyzed, in which the market mechanism, target of VPP and general optimization model are introduced. Finally, a novel VPP concept, Multi-energy Virtual Power Plant (MVPP) is introduced which is arising with the emergence of integrated energy system.