Addressing Trust Issues in Vehicle to Building Enabled Demand Response Using Blockchains

Abstract

Power system operators incentivize large consumers of electricity to reduce their demand during peak periods, where consumers can promise a fixed demand reduction in the form of a contract known as demand response (DR). Commercial building owners, particularly those who have electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, can utilize vehicle to building (V2B) technology to participate in DR, while also aggregating other on-site distributed energy resources (DERs) such as solar and batteries. However, the provision of V2B-enabled DR creates trust issues between EV owners, building owners, and power system operators in ensuring that the contracted DR capacity is delivered, and that operational preferences, such as the minimum state of charge of EVs participating, is respected. Thus, this paper proposes a blockchain-based system to create a shared ledger that stores contract details, including contract bids and EV state of charge, and executes automated smart contracts to record, monitor, and dispatch the DERs to ensure that the contracted capacity is realized without violating constraints. Through real-world scalability testing and DR event demonstration, the proposed system shows that it can support up to 10,000 DERs and deliver 20 kW of contracted capacity for a 4 hour DR event. vehicle to building, demand response