  The prevalence of distributed generation drives the emergence of the Virtual
Power Plant (VPP) paradigm. A VPP aggregates distributed energy resources while
operating as a conventional power plant. In recent years, several renewable
energy sources have been installed in the commercial/industrial/residential
building sector and they lend themselves for possible aggregation within the
VPP operations. At present, building-side energy resources are usually managed
by building energy management systems (BEMSs) with autonomous objectives and
policies, and they are usually not setup to be directly controlled for the
implementation of a VPP energy management system. This article presents a
Building VPP (BVPP) architecture that aggregates building-side energy resources
through the communication between the VPP energy management system and
autonomous BEMSs. The implementation technologies, key components, and
operation modes of BVPPs are discussed. Case studies are reported to
demonstrate the effectiveness of BVPP in different operational conditions.
