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Demand response and active management of distributed generation has lately been used in Europe as one of the important tools for balancing consumption and generation of electricity. Intermittency of renewable resources is bringing new risks to the power sector, which in the future will be manageable only with the help of new technologies.
Virtual power plants (VPPs) are advanced ICT systems that connect demand response and distributed generation resources into aggregation that can be used in a way similar to a peaking power plant for ancillary services, for imbalances reduction and for the optimization of the electricity trading portfolio.
Real-time measurement data is crucial for the operation of VPPs. This is usually not supported by the majority of today’s AMI systems, since they normally update the central database only once per day with 15 minutes readings. Furthermore, simultaneous requests from a billing centre and a virtual power plant may collide and hinder the data transfer. Because of that, the pulse counter and duplication of the communication path have been in practice ever since.
The new generation of the Landis+Gyr smart meters allows the set-up of two independent load profiles and two independent communication channels. This fulfils operational requirements for both: the virtual power plant and the billing centre.
CyberGrid will present practical use-cases of virtual power plants, describing the pilot project integration of the new smart meters and CyberGrid's software solution, and sharing the first practical experiences.
