Decision trees aided scheduling for firm power capacity provision by virtual power plants

The incorporation of Distributed Generation (DG) under the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) concept allows the market integration of several and largely dispersed electric power sources. One matter of concern for the VPP owner and operator is to follow the hourly schedule regardless of the stochastic nature of some of its sources or any unpredicted generation outages. This study presents a Decision Tree (DT) based methodology that prepares for the dispatching of power equivalent to the possible loss of the highest injection of one of the sources of the VPP (according to day-ahead hourly schedule) to the rest of its sources, on an hour-ahead horizon. This allows VPP operators to provide firm capacity and participate effectively in the energy market. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.