A two-tier game model based scheduling strategy for Virtual Power Plants

Recently, there has been a lot of attention on how to enhance the management capabilities of distributed electricity production and demand aggregation by Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), which poses the challenge of leveraging their ability to participate in electricity markets to maximize operating profits. This paper analyzes the scheduling problem in fully distributed controlled VPP and proposes a two-level game model. In this model, the Stackelberg game is used to describe the interaction between Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and Energy Management System (EMS). On the other hand, the competition between DERs is formulated by the Cournot game. EMS sets its electric rate as single-leader, and DERs generate the optimal generation capacity accordingly as multi-follower. Then, we analyze and obtain the relationship between the demand and the resource supply to achieve market equilibrium on maximizing the utility of EMS and DERs. Simulation results show the analysis’s correctness and the proposed strategies’ performance improvement.