An Efficient Method for Characterizing the Operational Feasible Region of Virtual Power Plant

Abstract The penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in the power system is increasing considerably in the last years. Virtual power plant (VPP) which provides services for power market and system dispatching is an important method to aggregate DERs. In this paper, the virtual power plant is studied from the perspective of “region”. The operational feasible region (OFR) of the virtual power plant is defined as the set of all active and reactive power output by the virtual power plant, in which the network constraints and the operation constraints of DERs will not be violated. A new approximation method is proposed to characterize the operational feasible region of a VPP. Based on iterative linearization, a strategy is proposed to improve the accuracy of the region description. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method is tested on the IEEE 30-bus system.