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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Arman AlahyariORCiD
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© 2026 Elsevier Ltd. Accurate accounting of carbon emissions within virtual power plants (VPP) scheduling is critical to ensure environmentally responsible and economically efficient operation in today’s low-carbon energy landscape. VPPs have become key platforms for aggregating distributed energy resources through advanced control and communication technologies. However, existing studies treat carbon accounting (CA) as a post-scheduling exercise, ignoring its real-time impact on operational decisions, and the carbon penalty strategies adopted are often overly simplistic, especially in the presence of energy storage. To address this limitation and enable cost-effective carbon emission reduction during the scheduling phase, this paper proposes an integrated CA-informed VPP optimal scheduling framework that includes a nonconvex problem formulation, McCormick relaxation to make the problem solvable, and an iterative algorithm to alleviate significant relaxation errors. To account for uncertainty in renewable energy output, we formulated the problem as a scenario-based stochastic optimization problem after obtaining a set of representative scenarios through the use of a modified distance-based scenario reduction algorithm. A stepped carbon penalty pricing strategy is incorporated into the problem formulation to represent the realistic carbon market in China. Furthermore, a profit-oriented framework has been developed to determine the marginal cost of carbon for VPP, enabling informed participation in carbon markets. Compared with the original scheme, the proposed CA-informed scheduling reduces carbon emissions by 4.56%, demonstrating its effectiveness in guiding low-carbon operational decisions. Additionally, the proposed carbon market participation strategy increases the daily profit of the VPP by 14.85%, indicating that emission reduction and economic improvement can be achieved simultaneously.
Author(s): Liu Q, Saifutdinov T, Alahyari A, Xue F
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks
Year: 2026
Volume: 47
Print publication date: 01/09/2026
Online publication date: 18/08/2026
Acceptance date: 14/08/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2352-4677
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.segan.2026.102501
DOI: 10.1016/j.segan.2026.102501
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