A Case Study on Data Mining Application in a Virtual Power Plant: Cluster Analysis of Power Quality Measurements

One of the recent trends that concern renewable energy sources and energy storage systems is the concept of virtual power plants (VPP). The majority of research now focuses on analyzing case studies of VPP in different issues. This article presents the investigation that is based on a real VPP. That VPP operates in Poland and consists of hydropower plants (HPP), as well as energy storage systems (ESS). For specific analysis, cluster analysis, as a representative technique of data mining, was selected for power quality (PQ) issues. The used data represents 26 weeks of PQ multipoint synchronic measurements for 5 related to VPP points. The investigation discusses different input databases for cluster analysis. Moreover, as an extension to using classical PQ parameters as an input, the application of the global index was proposed. This enables the reduction of the size of the input database with maintaining the data features for cluster analysis. Moreover, the problem of the optimal number of cluster selection is discussed. Finally, the assessment of clustering results was performed to assess the VPP impact on PQ level.