Distributed control of virtual storage plants in microgrids for short term operating reserve in UK

The concept of virtual storage plant is gaining increasing interest as flexible aggregation of distributed energy storage resources. Most of the past studies only focus on specific services that individual storage devices could provide, and there is still little understanding as to the opportunities that might arise from aggregating several different types of storage devices to provide services to diverse actors and the synergies of electrical and thermal energy storage systems. Multi-energy storage systems are considered in this paper, which consist of electrical energy storage and thermal energy storage devices. In this study a consensus-based distributed model predictive control framework is proposed for coordinating multiple multi-energy storage units, i.e., a virtual storage plant, to provide reserve services and to balance supply of on-site generation with electric demand within the microgrid. The proposed control framework is evaluated through numerical studies and its performance assessed.