Energy management and control of aggregated distributed generations

With power deregulation and the formulation of horizontal and competitive electricity market, non-utility-owned distributed generators (DG) are able to feed power into the utility distribution system. Today, the majority of ISOs have established the Demand Response programs to alleviate the transmission bottlenecks and to defer the infrastructure investments, which presents opportunity for distributed generators to bid into short-term forward market, such as day-ahead market, and enjoy the real-time locational market price. This paper proposes an overall framework for the energy management and control of a group of DGs, including wind turbine, photovoltaic, microturbine, and fuel cell energy systems, involved in day-ahead market as one virtual generator in terms of aggregated capacity. The control and communication architecture, operation flow and tasks, and automatic generation control structure will be presented. Potential issues regarding the dispatch algorithms and control performance will be discussed.