National Standard for Virtual Power Plants Officially Takes Effect
On September 1, 2026, the recommended national standard GB/T 47241-2026, Technical Guidelines for Virtual Power Plants, officially took effect. Led by the Electric Power Research Institute of China Southern Power Grid Co., Ltd., the standard was jointly drafted by 20 organizations, including China Southern Power Grid, State Grid Corporation of China, the China Electric Power Research Institute, Tsinghua University and Southeast University, filling the gap in full-process technical specifications for virtual power plants.
The document specifies requirements for virtual power plants covering general provisions, overall framework, resources and connection, systems and terminals, information and communications, safety protection, design acceptance and testing, operation and management, and benefits and evaluation. It applies to activities concerning the construction, connection, operation and management of virtual power plants.
The document states that a virtual power plant is an electric power operation organizational model and system that, based on power system architecture and by applying modern information and communications, system integration and control technologies, aggregates various distributed resources such as distributed generation, adjustable loads and energy storage, and, as a new type of market entity, jointly participates in power system optimization and electricity market trading.
A virtual power plant mainly consists of virtual power plant resources, virtual power plant terminals, the virtual power plant operator and technical support systems, as well as the data transmission channels among them. The architecture of a virtual power plant and its relationships with relevant business systems are shown in Figure 1.
A virtual power plant shall have the following basic characteristics:
a) the connected resources are distributed and should meet the management requirements of observability, measurability, adjustability and controllability;
b) resource aggregation and regulation are realized based on a digital platform, enabling coordinated participation in power system optimization and electricity market trading.
A virtual power plant should meet the following technical indicators:
a) total aggregated capacity of no less than 10 MW;
b) total regulation capacity of no less than 5 MW, with the regulation capacity of a single unit of no less than 1 MW;
c) a regulation rate of no less than 3% of the regulation capacity per minute;
d) continuous regulation duration of no less than 1 hour.
