Open Access

ARTICLE

Coordinated Market Clearing and Operation for Virtual Power Plants with Multiple Electricity Commodities

Tianhui Zhao¹, Jingbo Zhao¹, Peishuai Li^2,*, Hongjin Pan¹, Zhe Chen¹, Bingcheng Cen¹
1 Electric Power Science Research Institute, State Grid Jiangsu Electric Power Co., Ltd., Nanjing, China
2 School of Automation, Nanjing University of Science & Technology, Nanjing, China
* Corresponding Author: Peishuai Li. Email:
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Grid Integration of Intermittent Renewable Energy Resources: Technologies, Policies, and Operational Strategies)

Energy Engineering https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2026.076964

Received 29 November 2025; Accepted 20 January 2026; Published online 24 July 2026

Abstract

Virtual power plants (VPPs) serve as an effective means to aggregate and manage large-scale distributed energy resources (DERs). They can supply multiple electricity commodities—including electric energy, reserve capacity, and carbon allowances—to power systems. This paper proposes a coordinated market clearing and operation (CMCO) method for VPPs involved in trading multiple electricity commodities. First, we establish a bi-level CMCO framework that integrates the energy, reserve, and carbon markets. At the upper level, we build a distribution system decision model designed to minimize the total system costs, which cover wholesale market transactions and trades between VPPs involving various commodities. At the lower level, we construct a VPP operation model to optimize DER operation strategies and multi-commodity trading plans. Transactions between different VPPs follow a peer-to-peer (P2P) structure. This bi-level framework enables coordinated optimization of multi-commodity trading and operational decision-making. To efficiently solve the bi-level model with binary variables while protecting VPP privacy, we develop a distributed algorithm combining the dichotomy method and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Numerical simulations on a test system with three VPPs verify that the proposed method reduces operational costs by facilitating multi-commodity trading. The results also show that this approach improves DER utilization and supports the low-carbon transition of power systems.

---

Keywords

Virtual power plant (VPP); electricity market; coordinated trading and operation; multiple electricity commodities

---