Grid-aware VPP operation

The notion of Smart Grids entails the vision that energy grids handling one-way flows of energy evolve into Smart Grids dealing with multi-directional flows of energy and digital information. Numerous projects have already dealt with solving the resulting complexity and proposed several new, integrated approaches to delivering suitable information technology and operational technology solutions. However, most of those solutions took a certain perspective, such as the perspective of the technical grid operation, the perspective of the energy market, or the perspective of participating plants. Instead of only taking one of those perspectives into account, we capture a holistic view including all involved parties and introduce a Smart Grid approach that combines technical as well as economical aspects, thus bringing the different parties together. This approach results in improved economic optimization results while adhering to grid constraints, thus ensuring stable grid operation. We started validating the proposed approach in a field trial and we present first results.