An adaptive load dispatching and forecasting strategy for a virtual power plant including renewable energy conversion units A. Tascikaraoglu ⇑ , O. Erdinc, M. Uzunoglu, A. Karakas Department of Electrical Engineering, Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul 34220, Turkey highlights  Feasibility of virtual power plant concept for electricity market participation.  An economic operation based adaptive load dispatching strategy.  A new meteorological data forecasting algorithm.  Long term scheduling of virtual power plant components. article info Article history: Received 27 July 2013 Received in revised form 3 January 2014 Accepted 8 January 2014 Available online 2 February 2014 Keywords: Economic load dispatching Meteorological data forecasting Virtual power plant Renewable energy sources Hydrogen energy Thermal energy abstract The increasing awareness on the risky state of conventional energy sources in terms of future energy sup- ply security and health of environment has promoted the research activities on alternative energy sys- tems. However, due to the fact that the power production of main alternative sources such as wind and solar is directly related with meteorological conditions, these sources should be combined with dis- patchable energy sources in a hybrid combination in order to ensure security of demand supply. In this study, the evaluation of such a hybrid system consisting of wind, solar, hydrogen and thermal power sys- tems in the concept of virtual power plant strategy is realized. An economic operation-based load dis- patching strategy that can interactively adapt to the real measured wind and solar power production values is proposed. The adaptation of the load dispatching algorithm is provided by the update mecha- nism employed in the meteorological condition forecasting algorithms provided by the combination of Empirical Mode Decomposition, Cascade-Forward Neural Network and Linear Model through a fusion strategy. Thus, the effects of the stochastic nature of solar and wind energy systems are better overcome in order to participate in the electricity market with higher benefits. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The recently growing concern on negative environmental im- pacts of conventional means of energy production leads the researchers to focus more on alternative sources of energy. Besides, depletion of fossil fuels and accordingly the increasing unit costs of fossil fuel-based energy production have also accelerated the men- tioned research activities. Among the alternative sources, wind and solar energy conversion systems via wind turbines (WTs) and pho- tovoltaic (PV) systems have found a remarkable area of use and there is an increasing trend for wider penetration of these systems due to the legal promotions of governments of the developed and developing countries [1]. However, the produced power from such sources is directly related to the meteorological conditions of the installation site and this stochastic nature provides a lower reliability and accordingly decreases the competition capability of the plant owner with conventional constant power producers in the electric market. Thus, there is a strong need for integrating these sources with dispatchable energy conversion systems in a proper hybrid combination to provide a reliable power supply [2]. This hybrid combination can be evaluated in two different scales. The first one is the small scale evaluation of such hybrid sys- tems that supplies the demand of a specific place (a building, a group of buildings, an island, etc.) either in a stand-alone or grid parallel mode of operation. In this concept, the hybrid system com- ponents are physically in the same place and connected in a hybrid combination with suitable power conditioning units. The operation of such hybrid systems is evaluated in relevant literature studies given in Refs. [3–5]. A similar structure of hybrid combination can also be evaluated in large scale in the concept of recently investigated ‘‘Virtual Power Plant (VPP)’’ methodology. VPP is a combination of different distributed generation (DG) units including renewable energy systems, conventional/non-conventional 0306-2619/$ - see front matter Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2014.01.020 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +90 212 383 5866; fax: +90 212 383 5858. E-mail addresses: atasci@yildiz.edu.tr, akintasci@gmail.com (A. Tascikaraoglu). Applied Energy 119 (2014) 445–453 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apenergy