Robust Optimization Based Bidding Strategy for Virtual Power Plants in Electricity Markets

The variable generation from renewable energy sources makes them challenging to be integrated into electricity markets. Virtual power plant (VPP) is proposed to integrate various distributed energy resources (DERs) so as to participate into the electricity market as a single entity. In this paper, we investigate a VPP consisting of several thermal generation units and renewable generation units. An optimal bidding strategy of the VPP in pool-based electricity markets is proposed based on the robust optimization. Compared with the previous studies which almost exclusively use the stochastic programming approach, our approach only requires a deterministic uncertainty set, rather than the hard-to-obtain probability distribution on the uncertain data. Moreover, the computational cost of our approach is much smaller than that of the stochastic programming based approach. A realistic case study is presented and the results obtained verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach.