Understanding user behaviour in virtual power plant (VPP) communities

Overview

Virtual power plants (VPP) provide a viable solution to integrate intermittent renewable energy sources into the grid, where a transition from centralized to decentralized energy distribution can provide economic and ecological benefits and facilitate citizen empowerment and a sense of community. However, consumers are reluctant to adopt distributed energy systems such as rooftop solar panels and household and community battery storage, which provide electricity generation and storage technologies that are located close to the point of use, as opposed to centralized power plants (Liu et al., 2023).

In this project, we analyse user behaviour in VPP communities to improve the understanding of reluctance and uncertainties regarding the adoption of distributed energy systems. This will address a key challenge of renewable energy, that is intermittency, because the major renewable sources for electricity, in particular wind and solar, are subject to the inconsistencies of the weather (Watson et al., 2022).

References

• Liu, C., Yang, R. J., Yu, X., Sun, C., Rosengarten, G., Liebman, A., Wakefield, R., Wong, P. S. P., Wang, K. 2023. Supporting virtual power plants decision-making in complex urban environments using reinforcement learning. Sustainable Cities and Society, 99, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2023.104915
• Watson, R. T., Ketter, W., Recker, J., Seidel, S. 2022. Sustainable energy transition: Intermittency policy based on digital mirror actions. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 23(3), pp. 631-638. https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00752

Start date

15 November, 2024

End date

15 February, 2025

Location

QUT Gardens Point Campus, Y Block

Keywords

• Virtual power plants (VPP)
• Distributed energy systems
• User behaviour
• Technology adoption
• Energy informatics

Contact

Contact the supervisor for more information.