The power generation group has abundant power generation resources and large user load resources, and has a natural advantage in carrying out virtual power plant business. By laying out virtual power plant projects, it can enhance its influence in the new energy market, effectively improve the utilization rate of new energy, extend power supply to the user side, and optimize participation in the electricity market to obtain additional benefits.

Datang Group built a virtual power plant platform in Hebei Southern Power Grid in 2021, with a capacity of 308 megawatts connected in the first phase and a regulating capacity of 125 megawatts. The project helped to consume 28 million kilowatt hours of new energy and reduce carbon emissions by 28000 tons in the first four months of operation. State Power Investment Corporation has launched virtual power plant projects in Jiangsu, Shandong, and Shenzhen, piloting operational models such as "virtual power plant+power demand response", "virtual power plant+power auxiliary services", "virtual power plant+power spot", and "virtual power plant+major customers". The virtual power plant deployed by State Power Investment Corporation Shenzhen Energy Development Co., Ltd. has made profits by participating in the Guangdong electricity spot market trading, becoming the first case in China where a virtual power plant participates in the electricity spot market for profit. In addition, Huaneng Group has also established a virtual power plant platform and participated in multiple pilot projects, but it must be noted that in the reality of weak profitability of virtual power plants, the power generation group has not yet fully deployed in this field.

Suggestions for promoting the application of virtual power plants

At the policy level, it is recommended to improve the top-level design at the national level, and make a comprehensive plan for key issues such as the construction, operation, supervision, participation, data acquisition, pricing mechanism, communication standards, evaluation system, and subsidy distribution of virtual power plants, breaking down the regional policy barriers of virtual power plants; Promote the construction of a unified electricity market, facilitate the regulation of cross spatial distributed resources, and broaden the market boundaries of virtual power plants; Develop a secure and efficient sharing mechanism for smart meter data to provide underlying support for the operation of virtual power plants; Establish a unified regional scheduling platform, break the fragmented operation mode of virtual power plants, and avoid redundant research and development and construction of virtual power plant projects.

In terms of market mechanisms, in line with the inevitable trend of "separation of main and auxiliary" in the electricity market, the construction and operation of virtual power plants will be separated from the large power grid to promote their marketization process; Granting virtual power plants the same market subject status as other power plants and participating in fair market competition; Encourage virtual power plants to transform from invitation based to market-oriented, optimize incentive measures for virtual power plants through pricing, and increase the attractiveness of virtual power plants to users; Encourage and cultivate an energy aggregator system, leveraging the power of the market to develop highly decentralized distributed resources through small and sophisticated energy aggregators, and quickly sinking virtual power plant business to more users.

The core task in improving the economic viability of virtual power plants is to broaden their profit channels. Firstly, it is necessary to establish a unified trading system to assist distributed resources in autonomously optimizing their participation in demand response, auxiliary service markets, and spot markets; Secondly, develop carbon trading markets and green electricity trading markets for virtual power plants, and increase revenue sources by monetizing the green comprehensive benefits of virtual power plants; Finally, leveraging the peer-to-peer trading capabilities of virtual power plants, encourage them to participate in wall mounted electricity sales as independent market entities.

In terms of technology, we must pay more attention to key technologies beyond the construction of virtual power plant platforms, and fill the gaps in key technologies upstream and downstream; Focusing on the refined evaluation, modeling, situational awareness, and control of distributed resources, in the form of multi-objective optimization, to achieve comprehensive optimization of virtual power plant benefits, safety, stability, and customer energy consumption while meeting the needs of the power grid; Establish a unified virtual power plant standard system, interface specifications, and operating rules, improve virtual power plant data and network security research, and provide underlying support for the development of large-scale virtual power plants; Intensify the research and development efforts of directly controlled virtual power plants, promote various forms of energy storage, such as electric vehicles, 5G base stations, independent energy storage and other high-quality resources to access virtual power plants and provide rapid response capabilities; Accelerate the construction of digital infrastructure, develop standardized and lightweight virtual power plant terminals, and provide convenience for the access of small and medium-sized distributed resources.