	A virtual power plant is also a cloud-based central or distributed control center that takes advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and Internet of things (IoT) devices to aggregate the capacities of heterogeneous Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to form "a coalition of heterogeneous DERs" for the purpose of energy trading on the wholesale electricity markets or providing ancillary services for system operators on behalf of non-eligible individual DERs.