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
In this paper, we design and develop a scalable blockchain-based auction system for energy trading that outsources the execution of computation-intensive transactions to an off-chain network. The system is designed to promote peer-to-peer energy trading between electrical vehicles and energy suppliers. The idea is to reduce the burden on the blockchain by entrusting an off-chain network with the auction process. The off-chain network is composed of a small subset of nodes (validators) chosen randomly on-chain. The selected validators act as auctioneers to receive bids from energy suppliers, decide about the auction winner, and then announce it to the blockchain. In order to ensure the integrity of the decision made off-chain about the winner, the proposed winner is validated on-chain only if no dispute is raised by any of the bidders who participated in the auction. To secure the dispute process, the validators need to issue an acknowledgment receipt to each bidder using a Proof-of-Reception protocol, which consists of exchanging a digital receipt signed by at least one validator.
We evaluate and analyze the performance of a local electricity market for energy trading that we implemented on the Ethereum platform. The energy trading is based on a double auction with multiple sellers and multiple buyers; the matched price and volume are determined by a trade reduction mechanism. We benchmark the performance of Ethereum using a systematic blockchain performance evaluation method. Based on this, we propose and analyze an efficient market operation method. In particular, we relate the limits on the scalability and real-time performance of the market to the throughput and latency of the Ethereum platform. We also identify the minimum resources necessary to operate an Ethereum client.
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%.
This article considers both the influence of relay power and load control period on the load tracking performance in smart grid communication. First, based on regulation errors caused by load control with imperfect channel state information (CSI), the load tracking cost model integrated of load control period and relay power is established in smart grid communication. Then, a coordination mechanism of cost-sharing contract (CSC) is presented. In the CSC, the utility companies select the preferred contractual terms offered by the telecom operator (TO) to reduce their costs and coordinate the whole network system simultaneously. Finally, the theoretical analysis and simulation demonstrate that the simultaneous consideration of the relay power and load control period can reduce the costs of the utility companies, increase the profit of the TO, and improve the social welfare. Besides, the proposed coordination mechanism of CSC can coordinate the whole network system.
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.
Blockchain has been implemented in several application in smart grid systems, such as data management and cybersecurity in utility grid systems. In addition, blockchain has been deployed in peer-to-peer electricity trading in microgrid systems. Due to the promising Blockchain features, it is considered as a good fit for energy trading. However, Blockchain applications in power grids are in their infancy so there are many research opportunities in this field. This paper reviews the existing applications of Blockchain in power grids and suggests some new opportunities for applying this technology, especially in enhancing the resiliency of power grids.
Xingzhi Li, Bei Han, Guojie Li, Lingen Luo · 6 authors
With growing complexity and uncertainty from distributed generations and active customers, distribution networks are facing more unexpected events and topology changes; while very limited measurements may degrade the observability of distribution system states and endanger the security of the system. Meanwhile, massive data from various types of users (if they can be used), can be valuable for power utilities. This makes privacy and data security a more critical issue, while being endowed with operation and market flexibilities. Thus, we propose a blockchain-based privacy-protecting approach for Dynamic Topology Awareness (DTA) to distinguish topology changes from cyber anomalies, including physical, cyber and business layers. At the bottom layer (physical layer), the distribution network is partitioned into subareas and tie-line areas, coping with local data from measurement devices or users. Estimated border values from parallel local estimations would be examined through data consistency checking. And DTA consensus algorithm might be triggered, querying historical status stored as blockchain contracts for anomalies detections and new block formations. Voting mechanism is then adopted to verify new blocks from data tampering. The performance of the proposed DTA approach is validated through simulations to identify topology changes and cyber anomalies, with additional discussions on the trade-off between DTA sensitivity and estimation accuracy.
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.