Quantum Key Distribution for Virtual Power Plant Communication: A Lightweight Key-Aware Scheduler with Provable Stability

Virtual power plants (VPPs) are becoming a cornerstone of future grids, aggregating distributed PV, wind, storage, and flexible loads for market participation and real-time balancing. As operations move to minute-- and second--level feedback, communication security shifts from a compliance item to an operational constraint: latency, reliability, and confidentiality jointly determine whether dispatch, protection, and settlement signals arrive on time. Conventional PKI and key-rotation schemes struggle with cross-domain, high-frequency messaging and face long-term quantum threats. Quantum key distribution (QKD) offers information-theoretic key freshness, but its key yield is scarce and stochastic, often misaligned with bursty VPP traffic. This paper proposes a key-aware priority and quota framework that treats quantum keys as first-class scheduling resources. The design combines (i) forecast-driven long-term quotas and short-term tokens, (ii) key-aware deficit-round-robin arbitration, (iii) a preemptive emergency key reserve, and (iv) graceful degradation via encryption-mode switching and controlled down-sampling for non-critical traffic. A drift-plus-penalty analysis establishes strong stability under average supply--demand balance with quantifiable bounds on backlog and tail latency, providing interpretable operating guarantees. We build a reproducible testbed on IEEE 33- and 123-bus VPP systems and evaluate normal, degraded, and outage regimes with industry-consistent message classes and TTLs. Against FIFO, fixed-priority, and static-quota baselines, the proposed scheme consistently reduces tail delay and passive timeouts for critical messages, improves per-bit key utility, and enhances power-tracking reliability during key scarcity and regime switches.