Real-time power sharing: Dynamic control allocation and VPP aggregation

This paper studies the problem of the dynamic coordination of power generation by Distributed Energy Resource (DER) networks. The problem is posed as minimizing the fuel consumption by the whole network under prespecified overall power generation. Two technical challenges toward this end addressed in the paper are how to exploit control redundancy and how to account for limitations on available communication infrastructure. To fully exploit control redundancy, a state-space characterization of all stable right inverses of right-invertible systems is derived. Demands on the information exchange are alleviated via the proposed split of DERs into Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), which contain DERs with equal dynamics. It is demonstrated that this approach can substantially reduce both computational complexity and amount of information exchange in the system.