Aggregating buildings as a virtual power plant: Architectural design, supporting technologies, and case studies

Prevalence of distributed generation drives the emergence of the 'Virtual Power Plant (VPP)' paradigm. A VPP aggregates distributed energy resource and can operate as a conventional power plant. In recent years, a large portion of renewable energy sources are installed in the commercial/industrial/residential building side, and their potentials and flexibilities can be aggregated in the VPP context. Nevertheless, building-side energy resources are usually managed by building energy management systems (BEMSs) with autonomous objectives and policies, making them hardly to be directly controlled by the VPP energy management system as the state-of-the-art VPP. This study systematically presents a building VPP (BVPP) architecture that aggregates building-side energy resources through the communication between the VPP energy management system and autonomous BEMSs. The implementation technologies, key components, and operation modes of BVPPs are discussed. Case studies are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of BVPP in different operational conditions.