A Fog Computing Enabled Virtual Power Plant Model for Delivery of Frequency Restoration Reserve Services

Abstract

Nowadays, centralized energy grid systems are transitioning towards more decentralized systems driven by the need for efficient local integration of new deployed small scale renewable energy sources. The high limits for accessing the energy markets and also for the delivery of ancillary services act as a barrier for small scale prosumers participation forcing the implementation of new cooperative business models at the local level. This paper is proposing a fog computing infrastructure for the local management of energy systems and the creation of coalitions of prosumers able to provide ancillary services to the grid. It features an edge devices layer for energy monitoring of individual prosumers, a fog layer providing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) techniques for managing local energy systems by implementing cooperative models, and a cloud layer where the service specific technical requirements are defined. On top, a model has been defined allowing the dynamical construction of coalitions of prosumers as Virtual Power Plants at the fog layer for the provisioning of frequency restoration reserve services while considering both the prosumers’ local constraints and the service ones as well as the constituents’ profit maximization. Simulation results show our solution effectiveness in selecting the optimal coalition of prosumers to reliably deliver the service meeting the technical constraints while featuring a low time and computation overhead being feasible to be run closer to the edge.

Blockchain-Based Decentralized Virtual Power Plants of Small Prosumers

“…In our experiments, we have considered a set of small prosumers, their energy production profiles being taken from [46] which contains 4 years of data with a 15-minute sampling rate. The price per energy unit of energy requested by prosumers to join the VPPs is randomly generated in a 1-10 range of values.…”

“…We have run scenarios with different hierarchical structures using the energy profiles of prosumers from [46]. We have varied several parameters like the number of layers in the hierarchy and the maximum number of members in a VPP.…”

“…We have compared the proposed public blockchain-based solution with an edge-fog solution described in [46]. We evaluate the time needed to construct the VPP of the two solutions for several prosumers ranging from 5 up to 170.…”

Smart Grid Management Using Blockchain: Future Scenarios and Challenges

“…This will allow for automatic and decentralized assignment of new sites / assets to an outbound service based on the asset's particularities such as response time, sync times and maximum dispatch period (i.e. offering power factor regulation [24]).…”

Cybersecurity challenges in energy sector (virtual power plants) - can edge computing principles be applied to enhance security?

“…This growing deployment of small prosumers also poses a problem in the grid systems which also needs to adopt a decentralised approach to reduce the complexity and overcome the increasingly new challenges in management (Pop et al, 2019 ). These deployments pose a different set of problems in the form of efficiency in integration, energy supply security, continuity.…”