Today’s electricity system includes more and more smaller-scale sources of energy, plus more and more electric vehicles (EVs) that act as small-scale storage systems when they’re plugged in. Virtual power plants (VPPs) help manage all those “distributed energy resources” by pooling them into larger packages that can be included in day-ahead electricity markets.

In those markets, participants buy and sell electricity at binding prices for the following day. But making accurate bids can be…