Empowering residential energy resources through virtual power plants aggregation: The TRUST-PV proposal

Electricity production from renewable energy sources (RES) is characterized by its distributed nature and geographical dispersion of production facilities. Recently, energy storage has become both feasible and economically viable for residential installations. The ways the residential energy production and storage systems can be best exploited for the benefit of their owners and the community are to subject of on-going research. A recent proposal involves commercial aggregation of the dispatchable electricity via the integration of the residential storage into a distributed virtual power plant (VPP). In this paper we report on work conducted in the context of the TRUST-PV H2020 research project, discussing specifically the modelling, creation, and eventually pilot implementation of a virtual power plant -based on rooftop PV and residential batteries-, under a fine-grain control scheme. Residential production/storage resources are shared by their owners with a centrally managed/distributed controlled VPP. INACCESS’s state-of-art UNITY RES asset management platform is used for the management of the VPP, interacting with the residential power assets through custom and lightweight residential power controllers (RPCs). We present the control architecture, the business actors’ involvement, and the proposed service offerings.