Dynamic Aggregation of Virtual Power Plants with a Registry System for Distributed Energy Resources

A growing number of Distributed Energy Resources will be connected to the grid. These distributed energy resources have different technical capabilities, operational constraints and are distributed throughout the electricity network which results in an increasing operational complexity. Aggregators controlling these resources in a virtual power plant might need to reconfigure it in case of failing distributed energy resources (e.g. when the weather changes) or due to changing grid conditions on a system operators request. This means that both, aggregator and system operator, must maintain operational reserves such as frequency control which means also rising costs for the actors. Different approaches such as dynamic virtual power plants have been introduced to address these issues. Extending these approaches, the increasing automation and information as well as communication capabilities will allow the actors to exchange and share real-time data about these resource capabilities on demand, allowing the aggregator to dynamically reconfigure the virtual power plant with external capabilities of distributed energy resources prior operation and during runtime, allowing the virtual power plant to be adaptive towards changing situations. For this purpose a common, active registry system for energy resource capabilities is necessary. In this paper, we will describe a process to dynamically aggregate distributed energy resource capabilities a priori as well as during runtime allowing the adaptive reconfiguration of virtual power plants.