Modeling and Aggregating DER Flexibility Region in VPPs: An Elimination and Projection Approach

• Published in: 2024 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM) pp. 1 - 5
• Main Authors: Li, Chuyi, Zheng, Kedi, Feng, Cheng, Chen, Qixin, Vergara, Pedro P.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 21.07.2024
• Subjects: Accuracy; Aerospace electronics; Computational modeling; distributed energy resources; Frequency control; load aggregation; Numerical models; Optimization; polytope; Transforms; Virtual power plant; Virtual power plants
• ISSN: 1944-9933
• DOI: 10.1109/PESGM51994.2024.10688569

The power generation and consumption of distributed energy resources (DERs) offer significant flexibility potential, which can be utilized to provide services such as peak and frequency regulation. DERs introduce a vast number of variables and constraints, making it complicated to directly integrate them into upper-level dispatch. To address this challenge, virtual power plants (VPPs) emerge, which treat diverse DERs as a collective entity and use aggregated flexibility envelopes to reduce the variable and constraint scale, facilitating upper-level optimization. In VPPs, unified DER modeling and efficient DER aggregation play a crucial role but are challenging. This paper first introduces a novel unified polytope model to represent heterogenous DERs' flexibility region. A coordination transformation is utilized to eliminate redundant variable dimensions and maintain DERs' interface characteristics. A sample-based projection method is then developed, further removing all state variables, resulting in a unified flexibility region. This method is then utilized to calculate the Minkowski sums of individual flexibility polytopes for aggregation. The results of numerical tests demonstrate a considerable reduction in computation time and maintain satisfactory accuracy when the proposed modeling and aggregation approach is adopted.