Publications
Design and Evaluation of a Secure Virtual Power Plant
For three years, Sandia National Laboratories, Georgia Institute of Technology, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign investigated a smart grid vision in which renewable-centric Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) provided ancillary services with interoperable distributed energy resources (DER). This team researched, designed, built, and evaluated real-time VPP designs incorporating DER forecasting, stochastic optimization, controls, and cyber security to construct a system capable of delivering reliable ancillary services, which have been traditionally provided by large power plants or other dedicated equipment. VPPs have become possible through an evolving landscape of state and national interconnection standards, which now require DER to include grid-support functionality and communications capabilities. This makes it possible for third party aggregators to provide a range of critical grid services such as voltage regulation, frequency regulation, and contingency reserves to grid operators. This paradigm (a) enables renewable energy, demand response, and energy storage to participate in grid operations and provide grid services, (b) improves grid reliability by providing additional operating reserves for utilities, independent system operators (ISOs), and regional transmission organization (RTOs), and (c) removes renewable energy high-penetration barriers by providing services with photovoltaics and wind resources that traditionally were the jobs of thermal generators. Therefore, it is believed VPP deployment will have far-reaching positive consequences for grid operations and may provide a robust pathway to high penetrations of renewables on US power systems. In this report, we design VPPs to provide a range of grid-support services and demonstrate one VPP which simultaneously provides bulk-system energy and ancillary reserves.