Impacts of Distributed Generation from Virtual Power Plants

As CO2 emissions and sustainable energy production have entered the focus of attention in politics and industry, ecologically advantageous alternatives are strongly promoted. We address virtual power plants from an information technological, economic and legal perspective in order to enable decentralized sustainable generation. For the realization of virtual power plants we draw on a peer-to-peer infrastructure with market coordination and legal coverage to manage the distributed generation units and we focus on the combination of power and heat. Based on our prototype for a decentralized market platform, we examine the economic and ecological impacts of an increasing pervasiveness of distributed generation and virtual power plants as well as their potential influence on society. At the social level, we consider questions of local immission, but also of growing awareness for power issues. With regard to the ecology, we expect a reduction of overall primary energy demand resulting from reduced transmission and transformation losses and increased use of combined heat and power plants at a local level leading to a reduction of emissions. Finally, since local distributed generation makes more efficient use of primary energy and long-distance transport lines can be reduced, we expect lower costs for the complete system as well as reduced uncertainty with regard to amortization of investments. Besides a description of the methodology our presentation will include selected results.