Virtual Power Plants for Grid Resilience: A Concise Overview of Research and Applications

The power grid is undergoing a transformation from synchronous generators (SGs) toward inverter-based resources (IBRs). The stochasticity, asynchronicity, and limited-inertia characteristics of IBRs bring about challenges to grid resilience. Virtual power plants (VPPs) are emerging technologies to improve the grid resilience and advance the transformation. By judiciously aggregating geographically distributed energy resources (DERs) as individual electrical entities, VPPs can provide capacity and ancillary services to grid operations and participate in electricity wholesale markets. This paper aims to provide a concise overview of the concept and development of VPPs and the latest progresses in VPP operation, with the focus on VPP scheduling and control. Based on this overview, we identify a few potential challenges in VPP operation and discuss the opportunities of integrating the multi-agent system (MAS)-based strategy into the VPP operation to enhance its scalability, performance and resilience.