DESIGN OF AN OPEN-SOURCE LABORATORY DEMONSTRATOR FOR PEER-TO-PEER TRADING IN LOCAL ENERGY MARKETS

Abstract

There is significant research interest in new energy trading mechanisms based on peer-to-peer or community-based markets, which are more consumer-centric and direct compared to traditional electricity retail markets. Such trading mechanisms require an electricity trading platform that can manage and settle energy transactions from vast numbers of small distributed energy resources, and therefore scalability and interoperability are major challenges. The hardware, communications and software required for implementing local energy trading platforms needs to be designed, tested and demonstrated in a real-time environment. Accordingly, this paper presents a design for an open-source laboratory demonstrator, which allows testing of the hardware and software required for peer-to-peer local energy trading using distributed ledger technology.