Renewable energy sources prevail as a clean energy source and their penetration in the power sector is increasing day by day due to the growing concern for climate action. However, the intermittent nature of the renewable energy based-power generation questions the grid security, especially when the utilized source is solar radiation or wind flow. The intermittency of the renewable generation can be met by the integration of distributed energy resources. The virtual power plant (VPP) is a new concept which aggregates the capacities of various distributed energy resources, handles controllable and uncontrollable loads, integrates storage devices and empowers participation as an individual power plant in the electricity market. The VPP as an energy management system (EMS) should optimally dispatch the power to its consumers. This research work is proposed to analyze the optimal scheduling of generation in VPP for the day-ahead market framework using the beetle antenna search (BAS) algorithm under various scenarios. A case study is considered for this analysis in which the constituting energy resources include a photovoltaic solar panel (PV), micro-turbine (MT), wind turbine (WT), fuel cell (FC), battery energy storage system (BESS) and controllable loads. The real-time hourly load curves are considered in this work. Three different scenarios are considered for the optimal dispatch of generation in the VPP to analyze the performance of the proposed technique. The uncertainties of the solar irradiation and the wind speed are modeled using the beta distribution method and Weibull distribution method, respectively. The performance of the proposed method is compared with other evolutionary algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the genetic algorithm (GA). Among these above-mentioned algorithms, the proposed BAS algorithm shows the best scheduling with the minimum operating cost of generation.
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