China’s First Automatic Virtual Power Plant System Begins Trial Operations

Shenzhen - As flexible power resources are beginning to be connected to the vast China Southern Power Grid electrical operations, namely the cool-storage air conditioning systems, charging facilities for EVs, energy storage, and distributed resources, the operational grids are facing unforeseen challenges.
Among these new issues are how to effectively regulate and control these flexible power resources in a city without building new power plants?
Recently, China’s first virtual power plant system was put into trial operations at the 110-kV embedded substation of Shenzhen, which will be part of a multi-pronged solution to varied challenges and pave a new direction for big cities to eliminate the bottleneck of limited land resources and increase the potential of the electricity industry.
It is known that although the device carrying this system covers less than one square meter, it is able to function as large power plants in terms of peak load regulation and voltage control.
Currently, the technical terms proposed by Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau senior manager and engineers are based on R＆D experiences that have been adopted by the first international standard system on virtual power plant with the entire system selected as one of the typical cases found throughout the international community.
According to Dr. Jiao Fengshun, a technical expert with the Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau, “rather than a physical plant, the virtual power plant system operates through a smart grid technology but will not change the way to interconnect the flexible power resources with power grids”.
Dr. Jiao added that, “with advanced communication and automatic gathering technologies, the system provides a way to regulate and control the stable operations of the grid by efficiently increasing resources, gathering the scattered flexible power resources which are later converted into controllable resources and coordinating the dispatch of traditional electrical energies and flexible power resources.
When compiling the first international standard on the virtual power plant, engineers from the Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau undertook the major tasks including creating new technical terms for the controlling structures as function settings and application strategies of the virtual power plant were all adopted and the project was selected by the standard compiling group of IEC as a typical international case of virtual power plant.
As the constructor of the Virtual Power Plant Beacon Project of CSG, the Bureau is now in full operation, promoting the application of virtual power plant system.
It is estimated that more than 20 MW of flexible power resources in several regions of Shenzhen will be connected to the virtual power plant. Concurrently, the the Bureau will contribute more “CSG’s wisdom” in establishing and improving on these high standards & technology systems.