The real-time biggest challenges in energy balance and delivery by Virtual Power Plant System stems from the complex nature of the system, barriers associated with the integration of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) multiple sites, demand-side responses, regulatory tools, Market economics, logical and physical standards, networking, technical, models’ proliferation and the dynamics of current technologies; requiring the service of a higher digitization level.
Industry 4.0 as the key driver of both the horizontal and vertical integration maintains real-time optimal energy operations, distributions, scheduling, forecasts, pricing and demand responses for enterprises, which performance is also constrained by cybersecurity, information networks, and protocols, maintenance, technical and economic.
To satisfy these requirements for real-time energy balance, reliability, flexibility, resiliency and sustainability, the operational and functional systems in order to perform require automated intelligent distributed technologies and control interfaces, data information techniques, protocols and cloud platforms.
This paper, therefore considers the technical and operational requirements of VPP supported by industry 4.0 for interoperability and integration of DERs, optimization of Supply and Demand-side energy management, standards and protocols, best emerging management practices; and control strategies to mitigate system cyber security as integration tools to support and maximize DER benefits for the Stakeholders.