Balancing wind power fluctuations with a domestic Virtual Power Plant in Europe's First Smart Grid

Abstract

The use of renewable energy source for the transition towards a sustainable future imposes a number of new challenges for the electricity grid, one of them being the balancing of supply and demand. The flexibility in Virtual Power Plants can be used within a Smart Grid to dampen the intermittent behavior of wind and solar energy. In the Dutch Smart Grids pilot “PowerMatching City”, a domestic virtual power plant has been created that can shifts its energy demand and production. One of the cases studies was to use this flexibility to compensate the imbalance caused by wind energy.