IoT-based real time energy management of virtual power plant using PLC for transactive energy framework

The growing interest with the developments of renewable sources owing to less environmental pollution creates challenges for the grid operators. Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is a novel concept that will integrate the small distributed energy resources and will act as a single conventional power plant in the electricity market. As a core energy management system in VPP, the energy should be dispatched optimally for achieving the maximum profit. Therefore, smart energy management is developed in this article of VPP with Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) and Internet of Things (IoT) in a unified market environment that integrates the DA and RT market. The cost characteristics for the interruptible load, battery storage system are modelled individually. The PLC and IoT based automation is proposed for optimal dispatch strategy of VPP. The proposed scheme can efficiently handle the energy demand for the VPP domain. Four different scenarios are considered with different loading conditions for validation of the concept of smart energy management. The profitability for each scenario is shown with the experimental results.