Webinar: Forecasting for Virtual Power Plants

Featured Speaker: Dr. Ulrich Focken, energy & meteo systems

Ulrich Focken is the co-founder and CEO of energy & meteo systems GmbH, a company specialized in energy management and renewable power forecasting. He holds a Ph.D. in the field of wind power predictions; the degree he obtained from University of Oldenburg, Germany. Together with Dr. Matthias Lange, Ulrich co-founded energy & meteo systems GmbH in 2004, which soon emerged as one of the world’s leading suppliers of wind and solar power forecasts.

Under Ulrich’s visionary leadership, the company expanded its portfolio to a range of services for the renewable power integration into the electricity grids and energy markets, such as its Virtual Power Plant (VPP) services. With its VPP services, energy & meteo systems assists Europe’s leading power producers and traders in managing decentralized power sources and controllable loads and binding them to the different energy markets. Ulrich has made significant contributions in several national as well as international research projects on grid integration of renewable energies and has authored/co-authored several publications in the same field.

Moderator: Charlie Smith, ESIG Executive Director

Registration Cost: FREE

Additional Information: With the growing interest in DERs and their increasing capability, the idea of virtual power plants (VPP) is rapidly spreading.  A VPP is a web of decentralized power generation units, controllable as well as non-controllable power consumers, energy storage units and a central control system.  Using real time communication between participating units and the VPP software, the control system is able to monitor, forecast and dispatch the networked units. Real time data access to VPPs led to optimized power forecasts and significant forecast improvements.  This webinar will describe how the portfolio formed by these aggregated units becomes a single dispatchable resource that offers flexibility and reliability services from the networked units, according to market conditions.  With the interest in aggregation of DERs, VPPs are gaining popularity world-wide.