The purpose of this document is to provide a second update to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and the industry regarding the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Demonstrations progress and lessons learnt.
Report extract
This report provides an update to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and the industry regarding the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) Demonstrations progress and lessons learnt.
General insights
- The operational visibility and capabilities shown in the VPP Demonstrations project represent foundational building blocks to enable AEMO to operate the power system with high levels of distributed energy resources (DER).
- The VPP industry remains small, and in the early stages of capability development.
- AEMO is engaging with over 20 early stage VPPs that are seeking to rapidly develop their scale and capability to deliver energy services and competitive business models to consumers.
Performance insights
- VPPs continue to demonstrate their effective capability to respond to both contingency Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) events and energy market price signals.
- VPPs have demonstrated promising capability to accurately forecast their performance. Evidence indicates that 1-hour-ahead forecasts are clearly most accurate, and that there are only minor variances between the other intra-day and day ahead forecasts. Accurate forecasting would be an important capability for VPP participation in potential ahead markets in future.
- The forecasting and control methodology of VPPs will require careful planning to ensure the use of the resource can be well forecast, so as to provide assistance to the grid where required.
- When operating in both the energy and FCAS markets, VPPs should consider how responding to an energy price signal that conflicts with a contingency FCAS event could impact their ability to accurately deliver on their enabled FCAS.
