l'Actualité du Solaire

A virtual power plant maximises the performance of renewable energy assets during periods of energy oversupply. It can regulate thousands of data points based on price signals, and can enable owners of generating assets to support their systems in seconds and with very high granularity.

French renewable energy company CNR is partnering with Germany's energy & meteo systems to improve the response of its renewable energy assets to negative price signals. CNR proposes either that the energy producer manages and therefore reduces its production or it is delegated to CNR to use meteorological systems to limit the production of solar or wind energy when prices are negative. The latter intervenes when the network is saturated.

A virtual power plant uses algorithms that significantly improve performance by optimising the use of available energy resources and networks.

The French spot market recorded eleven hours of negative prices last year, compared with four hours in 2017. But as our country wants to increase its share of renewable energy capacity, such events could occur more often. Germany recorded 134 hours of negative energy prices last year, compared to 146 in 2017.

PV Magazine of 28 June

Editor's note Virtual power stations may not seem to be in use much yet, but they have a big future: Their principle is to supply surplus energy from one producer to another who is short of it, or to collect small surpluses to group them together and turn them into a large volume that can be used by another consumer or sold on the market.

Virtual power plants act at a given moment T to link surpluses and shortages, and therefore act within a community or a group of consumers. On the contrary, batteries serve the same producer-consumer: the surplus production is kept for the moment when there is a shortage of energy.

Virtual power plants can be coupled with batteries. The latter would absorb the excess energy after the supply to demanders.