Designing and optimizing a coupled carbon-green certificate market for building cluster VPPs: A data-driven distributionally robust approach

This study proposes and evaluates a novel coupled carbon-green certificate market mechanism. It addresses the challenge that the environmental value of self-consumed building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) cannot be effectively monetized due to the restricted trading of green certificates for distributed photovoltaics. The paper first establishes the architecture of a virtual power plant (VPP) that aggregates distributed energy resources. Then, it introduces a coupled trading mechanism. This mechanism converts surplus green environmental value into carbon emission allowances, enabling participation in both markets. To address modeling challenges, this study employs high-fidelity EnergyPlus simulations to generate physics-informed load profiles. These profiles naturally capture the thermal inertia of building envelopes. Based on this, a data-driven distributionally robust optimization (DRO) model is developed. This model determines the optimal VPP dispatch strategy under uncertainty. Case studies comparing different building combination models reveal that a VPP dominated by office buildings achieves the highest unit revenue of 231.05 CNY/m2·year due to a high temporal-spatial alignment between energy generation and load. In contrast, an office–hotel mixed model demonstrates greater potential for large-scale adoption. This configuration reduces gas turbine costs by 60.8% compared to single-type commercial clusters, thereby achieving significant economic-environmental synergy. Furthermore, results indicate that the stepwise carbon-green certificate coupling mechanism effectively monetizes the environmental value of self-consumption, increasing the annual net revenue by 4.2% compared to the decoupled trading mode. Overall, this study provides a theoretical foundation and a decision-support tool for developing market-oriented, collaborative, and efficient new energy operation models for urban building clusters.