Prevalence of distributed generation drives the emergence of the ‘Virtual Power Plant (VPP)’ paradigm. A VPP aggregates distributed energy resource and can operate as a conventional power plant. In recent years, a large portion of renewable energy sources are installed in the commercial/industrial/residential building side, and their potentials and flexibilities can be aggregated in the VPP context. Nevertheless, building‐side energy resources are usually managed by building energy management systems (BEMSs) with autonomous objectives and policies, making them hardly to be directly controlled by the VPP energy management system as the state‐of‐the‐art VPP. This study systematically presents a building VPP (BVPP) architecture that aggregates building‐side energy resources through the communication between the VPP energy management system and autonomous BEMSs. The implementation technologies, key components, and operation modes of BVPPs are discussed. Case studies are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of BVPP in different operational conditions.

Aggregation of heterogeneous distributed energy resources (DERs) and prosumers for profit maximisation by virtue of the market interface has evolved into virtual power plants (VPPs). The VPP operator optimises its aggregated resources to maximise profit by participating in the wholesale electricity market. VPP resources may be geographically dispersed and connected to a transmission grid at various nodes having different locational marginal prices (LMPs). These LMPs vary throughout the day and exhibit mutual correlation. Considering this, the current study presents a profit maximisation framework for VPP operators working under multiple LMPs, with their correlated uncertainties. This work also provides VPP resource scheduling for profit maximisation, considering optimal trading at various LMP nodes for a constrained internal network. This decision is devised using Markowitz's mean‐variance (M‐V) criterion under expedient correlation between volatile LMPs. A numerical case study on the proposed model with the PJM market demonstrates that LMP correlation alters the role of the VPP operator. This affects its trading and scheduling decisions as a buyer/seller at various time intervals to improve its profit–risk trade‐off and consequently the market interfacing of the VPP operator. The proposed model is relevant in practical market conditions for day‐ahead/medium‐term VPP planning while managing market uncertainty.

This paper presents the potential of building a local electricity market (LEM) to boost the deployment of the local energy communities, centred around active customers with distributed energy resources (DERs). To conduct a comprehensive and detailed study on different cases with reduced computational burdens, this paper adopts a simplified modelling approach where the market and network model simulations are performed in a cascaded, decoupled fashion. This allows achieving the optimal LEM output for the energy community with different DER assets that are not bounded by the network constraints. The investigation involves quantifying the benefits brought by LEM to energy communities by tapping the flexibility associated with trading inside the energy community. Moreover, it presents the influence of different types of DERs (mainly photovoltaics (PV) and energy storage (ES)) in customers' premises on the outcome of the LEM. The LEM demonstrates successfully the reduction of cost associated with the energy purchased from the energy retailer and maximises the consumption of locally generated clean electricity. Among the studied DER portfolios, the combination of PV and ES solution shows the highest economic potential but deteriorates the voltage profiles and shows high active power loss in the winter month among all the cases examined.

Smart local energy systems (SLES) have been reported in the past decade, which are associated with diverse energy carriers, components and objectives. This paper provides a comprehensive review of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure of SLES. A systematic survey of existing research work and industrial projects was provided to highlight, categorise and analyse the ICT infrastructure, which lays the foundation for the successful functioning of SLES. First of all, various SLES measurements are described and categorised based on the energy carriers and technologies. Then, communications infrastructure for SLES is described with communications technologies summarised. Moreover, the ICT infrastructures for SLES are categorised and summarised based on their objectives and technologies. Finally, the challenges and recommendations are presented. The findings from this paper are intended to serve as a convenient reference for developing future SLES.