Matthew Gough, Sérgio F. Santos, Artur Almeida, Mohammad Sadegh Javadi · 7 authors
The combination of consumer owned Distributed Energy Resources, new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), as well as changes to the national electricity regulations have created new opportunities for consumer engagement in the electricity sector. In this paper, this combination of technologies and regulations is examined in the Portuguese context. The new regulations dealing with self-consumption from prosumers are combined with smart contracts and distributed ledger technology to formulate an automated energy trading system for residential end-users in local energy markets. Results show that including prosumers in the local energy market brings significant benefits to all market participants. Additionally, results show that the newly created regulatory role of a Market Facilitator is beneficial to these type of local energy exchanges.
Abstract Demand response is recognized as an effective solution for eliminating power fluctuations and satisfying capacity constraints in power systems. A growing customer base equipped with energy storage and intelligent power meter on the demand side has resulted in the strong interest of China's power companies in demand response. However, most exiting demand response programs in China are based on a centralized framework, which is easier for management, but cannot support a large number of scattered small‐scale users' participation effectively. Therefore, taking the desired features of blockchain technology, such as decentralization, trustworthiness, trackability, and immutability into consideration, the applicability of blockchain in demand response is analyzed. On this basis, a new blockchain‐based framework of China's typical demand response programs is proposed, in which consensus mechanism, encryption algorithm, and smart contract of blockchain are applied to the process of invitation, bidding, and settlement in demand response. Furthermore, the development suggestions of China's demand response based on blockchain technology are put forward from the aspects of trading products, credit management, and platform construction at the end of this work.
Ümit Cali, Murat Kuzlu, Manisa Pipattanasomporn, Onur Elma · 5 authors
Renewable energy sources (RES) are among the most popular emerging energy\nresources during the past two decades. Many countries have introduced various\nenergy policy instruments, such as renewable energy certificates (RECs), to\nsupport the growth of RES. RECs are tradable non-tangible assets, which have a\nmonetary value. Tracking and certification of the origin of an energy resource\nregardless of its type (e.g., a conventional power plant or RES) is a critical\noperation. In addition to the certification of origin, trading transactions are\nneeded to be performed using a secure method. Energy industry participants need\nto secure the data and applications related to RECs. Distributed ledger\ntechnology (DLT) is a perfect framework that can support such REC\nfunctionalities. This paper addresses the cybersecurity aspects in REC trading\nusing Blockchain and a distributed ledger technology, considering detailed\ncybersecurity perspectives.\n
The increasing amount of distributed energy resources including renewable energy systems and electric vehicles is expected to change electric power grids significantly, where conventional consumers are transformed to prosumers since they can produce electricity as well. In such an ecosystem, prosumers can start offering their excess energy to supply demands of the other customers on the grids behind the meter without interference of distribution system operators (DSO). Besides, DSOs require more accurate and more frequent data form prosumers' net demand to be able to operate their network efficiently. The main challenge in these new distribution grids is the amount of data that needs to be collected in this platform is unbelievably high, and more immortally, prosumers will likely refuse to share their information with DSOs due to their potential privacy and economic concerns. Blockchain technology as an efficient distributed solution for management of data and financial transactions, has been considered to solve this trust issue. With blockchain-based solutions, data and financial transactions between all parties will take placed through distributed ledgers without any interference from an intermediary. In this paper, impacts of blockchain technologies on electric power industry is studied. The paper specifically focuses on LO3 Energy -- one of startups applying blockchain to electric power grids -- their blockchain-based solution called Exergy, and their use cases to implement such solutions.
This work presents the design and implementation of a blockchain system that enables the trustable transactive energy management for distributed energy resources (DERs). We model the interactions among DERs, including energy trading and flexible appliance scheduling, as a cost minimization problem. Considering the dispersed nature and diverse ownership of DERs, we develop a distributed algorithm to solve the optimization problem using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) method. Furthermore, we develop a blockchain system, on which we implement the proposed algorithm with the smart contract, to guarantee the transparency and correctness of the energy management. We prototype the blockchain in a small-scale test network and evaluate it through experiments using real-world data. The experimental results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our design.
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.
With the development of the energy Internet, more distributed generators are connected to the power grid, resulting in numerous heterogeneous energy networks. However, different energy networks cannot perform efficient energy trading in the centralized management mode, this deeply affecting the complementary ability of heterogeneous energy, resulting in the islanded energy phenomenon. In this model, the same energy on the chain is traded within the chain, and the heterogeneous energy on different chains is traded across chains. To trade energy between heterogeneous energy networks more efficiently, the blockchain-based cross-chain model is proposed based on the existing infrastructure. Heterogeneous energy nodes are assigned to different energy sub-chains and cross-chain energy transactions are performed through a relay-chain, which utilizes the improved Boneh–Lynn–Shacham signature scheme consensus algorithm based on the proof-of-stake and practical Byzantine fault tolerance. The experimental simulations on energy trading efficiency, throughput, and security, show its superiority over existing systems. Further, the simulation results provide a reference for the application of cross-chain technology in energy interconnection.
Nikita Karandikar, Antorweep Chakravorty, Chunming Rong
Renewable energy microgeneration is rising leading to creation of prosumer communities making it possible to extract value from surplus energy and usage flexibility. Such a peer-to-peer energy trading community requires a decentralized, immutable and access-controlled transaction system for tokenized energy assets. In this study we present a unified blockchain-based system for energy asset transactions among prosumers, electric vehicles, power companies and storage providers. Two versions of the system were implemented on Hyperledger Fabric. Assets encapsulating an identifier or unique information along with value are modelled as non-fungible tokens (NFT), while those representing value only are modelled as fungible tokens (FT). We developed the associated algorithms for token lifecycle management, analyzed their complexities and encoded them in smart contracts for performance testing. The results show that performance of both implementations are comparable for most major operations. Further, we presented a detailed comparison of FT and NFT implementations based on use-case, design, performance, advantages and disadvantages. Our implementation achieved a throughput of 448.3 transactions per second for the slowest operation (transfer) with a reasonably low infrastructure.
Chao Liu, Xiaoshuai Zhang, Kok Koeng Chai, Jonathan Loo · 5 authors
Abstract Electric power grid infrastructure has revolutionized our world and changed the way of living. So has blockchain technology. The hierarchical electric power grid has been shifting from a centralized structure to a decentralized structure to achieve higher flexibility and stability, and blockchain technology has been widely adopted in the energy sector to deal with grid management, billing, metering, and so on, because of its nature of decentralization. Here, the aim is to provide a multi‐dimensional review on the technological advances of the blockchain in smart grids. Its corresponding applications based on these advances, including company projects and use cases, are summarized. Furthermore, the security threat issues in smart grids, Ethereum Virtual Machine (i.e. the operating environment of consensus mechanisms), and smart contracts are analysed, with a brief conclusion to manifest the prior tasks in building secure blockchain‐based infrastructures in smart grids. As such, the challenges and features of different protocols and their applicability in each use case are identified to provide an insightful guide for future research studies.
Based on the diffusion of blockchain technology in the smart grid, this paper studies the framework and application of the blockchain technology in the smart grid, so as to combine the blockchain with the smart grid and establish a sustainable supply chain. However, the establishment of a sustainable supply chain is based on a layered theoretical framework. Not only should the framework take into account needless attributes and the relationship among various criteria and aspects but the application should also involve a balance of multiple stakeholders. For the above reasons, this paper uses a combination of Fuzzy-DEMATEL and ISM. The results show that (1) the hierarchical path of sustainable supply chain management of the smart grid under the blockchain starts from the social level, pays attention to system construction, grasps the technical standards, and defines the development goals of the power grid. (2) The development of green energy has become a new market growth point. (3) The control of the operation level becomes the focus of the smart grid. (4) The optimization and development of the economic structure are restricted by social factors. By integrating and optimizing the blockchain and supply chain, this paper puts forward a theoretical framework, establishes a sustainable GIP application system with multistakeholder participation at the supply chain level, and indicates the significance of the blockchain in the smart grid.
All the national and international regulatory boards are making different urgent decisions on decarburization of society, it is concomitant with digitalization and decentralization of power sector interconnected with renewable energy sources in the modern era. The Distributed Ledger Technology blockchain can be used in the energy sector in different aspects like generation, transmission, and distribution. The initial application of blockchain technology is to pay electricity bills by using the cryptocurrencies is presented here. The variable RES like wind, solar in the grid integration how the DLTs will contribute to the enhanced management of the power system. Finally, the transmission sector transmission charges based on power production, and losses are ruined optimally and blocks are interconnected to blockchain are presented clearly. Implementing blockchain technology to the transmission system generation, and distribution systems lead to the digitalization of the electrical industry. Using the blockchain technology the end-users to generation cost analysis will be recorded.
Power system reforms worldwide have commoditized electric energy, and thus the electricity market has been developed. With this, trading of electric energy takes place in various time-domains like the day ahead, real-time, etc. These transactions take place over the counter (OTC) or Power Exchange (Px), which provide the market participants with the required platform and payment security. The transactions on OTC and Px requires a third-party platform and guarantee for contract and settlement, there incurs overhead cost. Since electric energy is a fungible commodity, it can be transacted very well with the old system like barter. Energy Banking is one such mechanism wherein one utility supplies the energy to another utility that needs it more and, in leisure, the energy can then be provided back. The requisite security of the transactions can be provided by blockchain technology. Energy banking is presently being done only on a MW quantum basis with no price tag, despite the cost being dependent on the demand-supply ratio. To ensure energy banking transactions in real-time and free from the perils of financial settlements, this article suggests the use of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) model of blockchain technology for executing Smart Contracts mutually agreed upon by both parties and avoiding third party overhead costs. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2021-02-03-03 Full Text: PDF
Tarek AlSkaif, Jose L. Crespo-Vazquez, Milos Sekuloski, Gijs van Leeuwen · 5 authors
This paper proposes two novel strategies for determining the bilateral trading preferences of households participating in a fully Peer-to-Peer (P2P) local energy market. The first strategy matches between surplus power supply and demand of participants, while the second is based on the distance between them in the network. The impact of bilateral trading preferences on the price and amount of energy traded is assessed for the two strategies. A decentralized fully P2P energy trading market is developed to generate the results in a day-ahead setting. After that, a permissioned blockchain-smart contract platform is used for the implementation of the decentralized P2P trading market on a digital platform. Actual data from a residential neighborhood in the Netherlands, with different varieties of distributed energy resources, is used for the simulations. Results show that in the two strategies, the energy procurement cost and grid interaction of all participants in P2P trading are reduced compared to a baseline scenario. The total amount of P2P energy traded is found to be higher when the trading preferences are based on distance, which could also be considered as a proxy for energy efficiency in the network by encouraging P2P trading among nearby households. However, the P2P trading prices in this strategy are found to be lower. Further, a comparison is made between two scenarios: with and without electric heating in households. Although the electrification of heating reduces the total amount of P2P energy trading, its impact on the trading prices is found to be limited.
Trading based on distributed optimization is becoming a world-wide trend in energy markets. Without proper trading mechanism design, however, participants might act dishonestly, which further leads to potential trust crisis and even market failures. This trust issue has been overlooked in state-of-the-art trading mechanism design. Blockchain, known as the enabler of trust, is promising to address this challenge. However, current studies have not detailed how blockchain can disable dishonest participants in energy trading, and primarily give qualitative rather than quantitative analysis of blockchain value in energy trading. Here, we propose an energy trading framework by marrying blockchain and distributed optimization, where blockchain enables check and balance among participants and disables dishonesty. Our results on a multi-energy district demonstrate in a quantitative way how our proposed framework can help prevent energy market failures caused by dishonest participants.
The advent of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as distributed renewables, energy storage, electric vehicles, and controllable loads, \rv{brings} a significantly disruptive and transformational impact on the centralized power system. It is widely accepted that a paradigm shift to a decentralized power system with bidirectional power flow is necessary to the integration of DERs. The virtual power plant (VPP) emerges as a promising paradigm for managing DERs to participate in the power system. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based VPP energy management platform to facilitate a rich set of transactive energy activities among residential users with renewables, energy storage, and flexible loads in a VPP. Specifically, users can interact with each other to trade energy for mutual benefits and provide network services, such as feed-in energy, reserve, and demand response, through the VPP. To respect the users' independence and preserve their privacy, we design a decentralized optimization algorithm to optimize the users' energy scheduling, energy trading, and network services. Then we develop a prototype blockchain network for VPP energy management and implement the proposed algorithm on the blockchain network. By experiments using real-world data-trace, we validated the feasibility and effectiveness of our algorithm and the blockchain system. The simulation results demonstrate that our blockchain-based VPP energy management platform reduces the users' cost by up to 38.6% and reduces the overall system cost by 11.2%.
As blockchain and energy trading have become hot topics in industry and academia, this paper presents a brief literature regarding the blockchain-based energy trading in the fields of energy trading with blockchain. At first, the background and development process is presented, and then the applications of blockchain in energy trading are surveyed and analyzed. Finally, conclusions are summarized and important directions are highlighted in this field.
Marco Galici, Mario Mureddu, Emilio Ghiani, Gianni Celli · 7 authors
This paper suggests an application of blockchain as an energy open data ledger, designed to save and track data regarding the energy footprint of public buildings and public energy communities. The developed platform permits writing energy production and consumption of public buildings using blockchain-enabled smart meters. Once authenticated on the blockchain, this data can be made available to the public domain for techno-economic analyses for either research studies and internal or third parties audits, increasing, in this way, the perceived transparency of the public institutions. A further feature of the platform, starting on the previously disclosed raw data, allows calculating, validating, and sharing sustainability indicators of public buildings and facilities, allowing the tracking of their improvements in sustainability goals. The paper also provides the preliminary results of a field-test experimentation of the proposed platform on a group of public buildings, highlighting the possible benefits of its widespread exploitation.
Demand response (DR) services have the potential to enable large penetration of renewable energy by adjusting load consumption, thus providing balancing support to the grid. The success of such load flexibility provided by industry, communities, or prosumers and its integration in electricity markets, will depend on a redesign and adaptation of the current interactions between participants. New challenges are, however, bound to appear with the large scale contribution of smaller assets to flexibility, including, among others, the dispatch coordination, the validation of delivery of the DR provision, and the corresponding settlement of contracts, while assuring secured data access among interested parties. In this study we applied distributed ledger (DLT)/blockchain technology to securely track DR provision, focusing on the validation aspect, assuring data integrity, origin, fast registry, and sharing within a permissioned system, between all relevant parties (including transmission system operators (TSOs), aggregators, distribution system operators (DSOs), balance responsible parties (BRP), and prosumers). We propose a framework for DR registry and implemented it as a proof of concept on Hyperledger Fabric, using real assets in a laboratory environment, in order to study its feasibility and performance. The lab set up includes a 450 kW energy storage system, scheduled to provide DR services, upon a system operator request and the corresponding validations and verifications are done, followed by the publication on a blockchain. Results show the end to end execution time remained below 1 s, when below 32 requests/sec. The smart contract memory utilization did not surpass 1% for both active and passive nodes and the peer CPU utilization, remained below 5% in all cases simulated (3, 10, and 28 nodes). Smart Contract CPU utilization remained stable, below 1% in all cases. The performance of the implementation showed scalable results, which enables real world adoption of DLT in supporting the development of flexibility markets, with the advantages of blockchain technology.
Lehlogonolo P. I. Ledwaba, Gerhard P. Hancke, Sherrin J. Isaac, Hein S. Venter
The increasing strain on ageing generation infrastructure has seen more frequent instances of scheduled and unscheduled blackouts, rising reliability on fossil fuel based energy alternatives and a slow down in efforts towards achieving universal access to electrical energy in South Africa. To try and relieve the burden on the National Grid and still progress electrification activities, the smart microgrid model and secure energy trade paradigm is considered—enabled by the Industrial IoT (IIoT) and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). Given the high availability requirements of microgrid operations, the limited resources available on IIoT devices and the high processing and energy requirements of DLT operations, this work aims to determine the effect of native DLT algorithms when implemented on IIoT edge devices to assess the suitability of DLTs as a mechanism to establish a secure, energy trading market for the Internet of Energy. Metrics such as the node transaction time, operating temperature, power consumption, processor and memory usage are considered towards determining possible interference on the edge node operation. In addition, the cost and time required for mining operations associated with the DLT-enabled node are determined in an effort to predict the cost to end users—in terms of fees payable and mobile data costs—as well as predicting the microgrid’s growth and potential blockchain network slowdown.
Distributed energy, mainly composed of new energy, plays an important role in promoting the development of new energy. At present, the development of distributed energy is greatly hindered by imperfect trading platform and unstable output of new energy. Blockchain is decentralized, autonomous and requires collaborative management. Its own technical characteristics have the inherent advantages of reconstructing the energy system. The alliance chain in the blockchain is more suitable for building a distributed energy trading platform. The paper constructs a distributed energy transaction model based on alliance blockchain, studies the integration mode of blockchain and distributed energy transaction, and explores the application of blockchain in distributed transaction. The paper provides a new idea for optimizing and reconstructing the traditional distributed energy trading platform, and providing decision support for promoting distributed energy trading.
The current electricity networks were not initially designed for the high integration of variable generation technologies. They suffer significant losses due to the combustion of fossil fuels, the long-distance transmission, and distribution of the power to the network. Recently, \emph{prosumers}, both consumers and producers, emerge with the increasing affordability to invest in domestic solar systems. Prosumers may trade within their communities to better manage their demand and supply as well as providing social and economic benefits. In this paper, we explore the use of Blockchain technologies and auction mechanisms to facilitate autonomous peer-to-peer energy trading within microgrids. We design two frameworks that utilize the smart contract functionality in Ethereum and employ the continuous double auction and uniform-price double-sided auction mechanisms, respectively. We validate our design by conducting A/B tests to compare the performance of different frameworks on a real-world dataset. The key characteristics of the two frameworks and several cost analyses are presented for comparison. Our results demonstrate that a P2P trading platform that integrates the blockchain technologies and agent-based systems is promising to complement the current centralized energy grid. We also identify a number of limitations, alternative solutions, and directions for future work.
Jae Song, Eung Seon Kang, Hyeon Woo Shin, Ju Wook Jang
We implement a peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading system between prosumers and consumers using a smart contract on Ethereum blockchain. The smart contract resides on a blockchain shared by participants and hence guarantees exact execution of trade and keeps immutable transaction records. It removes high cost and overheads needed against hacking or tampering in traditional server-based P2P energy trade systems. The salient features of our implementation include: 1. Dynamic pricing for automatic balancing of total supply and total demand within a microgrid, 2. prevention of double sale, 3. automatic and autonomous operation, 4. experiment on a testbed (Node.js and web3.js API to access Ethereum Virtual Machine on Raspberry Pis with MATLAB interface), and 5. simulation via personas (virtual consumers and prosumers generated from benchmark). Detailed description of our implementation is provided along with state diagrams and core procedures.
The fast growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as distributed renewables (e.g., rooftop PV panels), energy storage systems, electric vehicles, and controllable appliances, drives the power system toward a decentralized system with bidirectional power flow. The coordination of DERs through an aggregator, such as a utility, system operator, or a third-party coordinator, emerges as a promising paradigm. However, it is not well understood how to enable trust between the aggregator and DERs to integrate DERs efficiently. In this paper, we develop a trustable and distributed coordination system for DERs using blockchain technology. We model various DERs and formulate a cost minimization problem for DERs to optimize their energy trading, scheduling, and demand response. We use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the problem in a distributed fashion. To implement the distributed algorithm in a trustable way, we design a smart contract to update multipliers and communicate with DERs in a blockchain network. We validate our design by experiments using real-world data, and the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.