A Collaborative Energy Management and Price Prediction Framework for Multi-Microgrid Aggregated Virtual Power Plants

Rapid integration of renewable energy sources poses a serious problem to the functionality of microgrids since they are characterized by underlying uncertainties and variability. This paper proposes a multi-stage approach to energy management to overcome these issues in a virtual power plant that combines heterogeneous microgrids. The solution is based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to coordinate internal energy pricing, microgrid scheduling, and virtual power plant-level energy storage system management. The proposed model autonomously learns the optimal dynamic pricing strategies based on load and generation dynamics, which is efficient in dealing with operational uncertainties and maintaining microgrid privacy due to its decentralized structure. The efficiency of the proposed solution is tested on comparative simulations based on real-world data, which prove the superiority of the framework to the traditional operation modes, which are isolated microgrids and the energy sharing scenarios. The findings prove that the suggested solution has a dual beneficial impact on both virtual power plant operators and involved microgrids, as it leads to profit enhancement and, at the same time, system stability. This process facilitates the successful balancing of conflicting interests among the stakeholders at a time when the operation is low-carbon. The study offers an overall solution to dealing with complicated multi-microgrids and brings substantial changes in the integration of renewable energy, as well as the distributed management of energy resources. The framework is a scalable model that can be used in the future perspective of power systems with high-renewable penetration to address both economic and operational issues of the contemporary energy grids.