A Low-carbon Operation Strategy for Virtual Power Plant Considering Spatial-temporal Coupling Characteristics of Small Hydropower Plants

To fully mobilize small hydropower resources in the virtual power plants to operate collaboratively， improve operational controllability， and reduce carbon emissions， a low-carbon operation strategy of virtual power plants （VPPs） considering the spatiotemporal coupling characteristics of small hydropower is proposed. Firstly， based on the network theory of node parameter modeling， a matrix collection characterizing the spatiotemporal coupling characteristics among multiple hydropower plants is proposed to facilitate efficient storage and convenient recall of information. Secondly， a low-carbon operation model of VPPs considering the spatiotemporal coupling characteristics is constructed with the objective of their day-ahead equivalent carbon emissions that take account of the regulation factor of the operation mode. The sharing of each hydropower plant’s reservoir capacity regulation is realized through aggregating coordinated scheduling of small hydropower. Finally， a small hydropower plant in a county of Zhejiang is used as an example to verify the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method.