This video explainer was uploaded by the Energy Research Institute at NTU on 21st October 2020.

Residential solar panels and battery backups are becoming more and more popular as efficiency rises and costs sink. This explosion in distributed solar makes a new idea possible: virtual power plants, or a smart network of individual solar panels that can act like a big power plant when electricity is needed most. And as extreme weather threatens many communities, this idea is arriving in the nick of time.

A recent study found that electric vehicle (EV) batteries used as a utility virtual power plant (VPP) could shift the entire residential peak load to nighttime hours with only 10% EV market saturation.

As distributed energy resources (DER) continue to proliferate, so do the reliability challenges associated with smaller, diverse, and dispersed assets now populating the world’s aging grid infrastructure.

Constrained by low capacity and volatility, the rapid growth of distributed energy resources are obviously slowdown resulting in consumption difficulty and investment obstacle. As an effective integration and management technology, virtual power plant (VPP) becomes a suitable cornerstone of renewable energy future development. Based on current scientific research, this study intends to provide a detailed review of VPP from an internal perspective (e.g. energy resources’ integration and operation) to the external aspect including participation in electricity market.

A smart, flexible electricity grid could help the UK cut carbon more cheaply, saving up to £40bn between now and 2050.