Introduction
VPP4Islands is a revolutionary concept developed for the specific needs of islands to enhance the use of the available RES and reduce fossil fuel consumption while ensuring electric grid stability and complying with Smart Grid standards. The vision of VPP4Islands is to develop a new concept for energy production, distribution and monitoring dedicated for islands. The new concept will promote RES use and revolutionize the existing small grids and Energy Communities (ECs) in Islands. The proposed flexible VPP will not be considered as a conventional power plant constituted of small distributed energy sources but as a flexible green power plant that can store surplus energy and modify their behavior and architecture to support unpredictable growth and change of energy demand, climate and market, delivering stability to the grid.
Concept
The concept of VPP4ISlands is mainly based on three notions: Digital Twin, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Virtual Energy Storage System (VESS). VPP4Islands project aims to provide innovative tools to facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources into existing grid systems while ensuring the stability of the energy system and flexibility of ancillary services (mainly scheduling / dispatch, balancing, reactive power, frequency and voltage control). The project aims to develop three tools.
The VPP4I Platform is a data and information service provider. It will collect data and information from real-time measurements of the physical systems (e.g. generation output, demand, voltage and current of the network), information on surrounding environment (e.g. price signals, weather info), and VPP Shadow; process such data and information using advanced software tools, e.g. machine learning, in order to provide an accurate and coherent data and information set for facilitating better decision making of the participants. It is not a data and service provider rather than a centralised operational centre. It will have a clear strategy on the data transparency and privacy. Moreover, this platform makes use of the digital twin concept which will combine the virtual and physical worlds together to make better decisions, reduce risks and perform forecasting.
In our applications, the digital twin comprises three main elements:
- The historical data collected from different platforms which allow to understand the past of energy production and consumption, propose improvements and lessons learnt from other experiences,
- The near real time data that permit to monitor and optimize the decision-making and share experiences with other VPP4Islands.
- The future data generated from AI/data-mining and Machine Learning to forecasting potential factors and increase flexibility.
Impacts
The VPP4Islands has several economic, technological, environmental and social impacts, with potential to improve the performance of distributed renewable energy sources (storage systems, dispatchable sources and variable outputs …).
This project will substantially contribute to increase considerably flexibility index and promote the utilization of distributed renewable energy in Europe. Also, VPP4Islands aims to strengthen European innovation capacity, identify new business opportunities for European companies and boost their growth. VPP4Islands will provide additional durable social and environmental effects that are detailed and measured in the following section. An initial list of KPIs linked to the Objectives is proposed below, as an example, while at the end of each Expected Impact, a relevant KPI is mentioned.
