[elleparismaroc 2023] Does not produce electricity, but manages electricity

In August 2022, Tesla held an emergency response event in California, where power shortages are most severe, and more than 2,300 Tesla users scattered across California used "virtual" to deliver home energy storage devices 'electric power plants'. Delivered where you need it most on the "PowerWall". This distributed power was up to 16 megawatts at one point.

This is a win-win effort. Users can export non-depleting electricity and earn $2 per 1 kWh of electricity. Dispatch of virtual power plants reduces the enormous strain on the power grid during periods of peak power consumption.

"Virtual power plant, as the name suggests, is a virtual power plant. It does not directly produce electricity, but acts as a power plant." Dr. Wang Chenggen, director of New Energy Technology Office at Jiangsu State Electric Power Research Institute, said the virtual power plant is actually an energy management system.

The traditional power grid has worked well for many years and formed a complete control system, so why build a virtual power plant from scratch?

In a traditional power system, the power grid adjusts supply-side power production according to consumption-side power demand, and most power plants on the supply side are large heat units with millions of units. megabyte

Wang Chenggen told Science and Technology Daily that with the construction of new power systems in recent years, power generation on the supply side and power demand on the power consumption side are becoming more and more random. Thus, they caused serious difficulties.

Particularly on the supply side, with the “dual carbon” targets and energy transitions of recent years, the share of wind power in the energy mix continues to grow, with new energies that are “weather dependent” and intermittent. In terms of power consumption, the level of charging terminals represented by the large-scale spread of air conditioners is increasing, and new loads such as charging rods are appearing, making it more difficult to predict power loads.

The emergence of virtual power plants can minimize strong random fluctuations in new energy power, improve the use of new energy, and blur the physical boundaries between power plants and energy supply and consumption in traditional energy systems.

A virtual power plant integrates and regulates relatively distributed power sources, power grids, loads, and energy storage devices to achieve "source, grid, load, and storage integration", which corresponds to a managed power source that can be referred to as a "power plant". It can also be used as a "positive power supply" to supply power to the system, or a "negative power supply" to absorb the power stored in the system, and realize valley cutting and filling flexibly.