Look-Ahead Strategic Offering for a Virtual Power Plant: A Multi-Stage Stochastic Programming Approach

The increasing number of distributed energy resources on the distribution side has promoted the development of virtual power plants to become active market participants. Considering the uncertainty in the market price and the wind generation in a virtual power plant (VPP) in the real-time operation, this paper proposes a look-ahead real-time offering strategy using a multistage stochastic programming formulation within each look-ahead horizon. We test the proposed model on a small virtual power plant. The supply offer curve and the demand offer curve for different market price cases are determined, and the operating states for the VPP system and its components under different scenarios are also obtained. Using the proposed look-ahead approach, the VPP can determine the rolling offer curves continuously to participate in the real-time electricity market.