Optimal Dispatch of Virtual Power Plant with Distributed Renewable Energy Resources and Building Water Supply Systems

With the rapid development of distributed renewable energy generation, the requirement of flexibility is also increasing. The traditional solution to increase flexibility is to configure energy storage. However, this method has some problems, such as high investment cost and large-area occupation. Therefore, it is a better method to fully exploit the flexibility of existing resources. This paper proposes an optimal dispatch method of the virtual power plant that aggregates distributed renewable energy resources and building water supply systems. It aims to explore the flexibility of building water supply systems. The proposed model is a mixed-integer non-linear programming model. Thus, a piecewise linearization method is applied to convert the proposed model to a mixed-integer linear programming model to make the model tractable. Simulation results show that the proposed method can not only increase operation economics of the virtual power plant but also enhance demand-side flexibility.