World energy systems are going through a continuous change. The focus has been shifted from large thermal or hydal power generation to small distributed generation, mainly based upon renewable energy systems. This transition is also backed by some governments. There have also been significant improvements in grid technology, and modern-day smart grid can provide real time bi-directional flow of data i.e. “real time energy deficit and surplus, and also real time prices to both producers and consumers. Smart grid can also accommodate intermittent small suppliers of electricity. This shift in energy generation policy and improvement in grid technology has opened ways for small scale energy producers and consumers to share energy with each other. It has also opened ways to purchase or sale energy to unknown peers over a smart grid. Need has been felt to store these transactions among peers in a secure, non-alterable yet quickly accessible way. Blockchain technology offers to provide this secure, unalterable yet quickly accessible ledger. In this study this transition process and role of blockchain technology for future energy systems has been historically reviewed. It has been found out that on top of keeping record of Peer to Peer transactions, blockchain technology can fill many other purposes. However, technology is still not matured for large scale projects, Research projects are underway to decrease the large time and energy consumption for block building computational processes yet keeping them safe and reliable.
Low cost, high efficiency, price transparency, and timely settlement of transactions are required for direct transactions between electricity providers and consumers in the microgrids. So the blockchain technology and the continuous double auction mechanism for direct electricity trading have always been a hot topic in the field of microgrids.In order to further reduce the transaction cost of blockchain and increase the transaction efficiency, and to solve the problem of lack of privacy protection for continuous double auction in the existing scheme, a privacy protection scheme of microgrids direct electricity transaction based on consortium blockchain and the continuous double auction is proposed. In it, the combination of consortium blockchain technology and continuous double auction mechanism is applied to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of transactions. In the meanwhile, pseudonyms and pseudonym certificates are generated by fair blind signature technology to realize identity privacy in the continuous double auction. And decentralization and user identity traceability are achieved by using (t, n) threshold secret sharing technology which distributes and recovers the private key of a trusted third party. The theoretical security analysis shows that the privacy protection scheme has higher security. The simulation experiment shows that the consortium blockchain technology has lower cost and higher efficiency in this scheme.
Borja Bordel, Diego R. Martín, Ramón Alcarria, Tomás Robles
Irrigation communities, especially in rural areas whose economy depends on agriculture, face a critical problem with the increasing water crisis. In this paper it is proposed a water control system to efficiently manage and coordinate the use of water in these communities. Blockchain technologies are employed to support trust among community members and commercial resource constrained devices communicating with the Blockchain network compose the hardware platform. A first implementation of this system and an evaluation of the system's performance are also presented.
Micro and decentralized generation of electrical power is an emerging trend in the power industry. Blockchain technology allows decentralized and instant monetary and contractual transactions to occur over peer to peer private and public networks by satisfying cyber security concerns. Both changes have the potential to enable paradigm shift in the field of energy in the coming years. Decentralization in the energy business makes this sector a good playground for blockchain technology. As of now, energy applications of blockchain technology are in conceptual and early stage prototyping levels. This paper aims to present a comprehensive review of P2P energy trading related blockchain technology applications and proposes a comprehensive multi-layer energy model architecture for the peer to peer (P2P) energy trading implementations where the use of blockchain technology is integrated. P2P energy trading allows consumers to become prosumers of electricity in a more efficient, trustable, and profitable way. Furthermore, this study demonstrates an Ethereum based blockchain testbed exhibiting blockchain concepts and how they can be used in the field of P2P energy trading within a commodity microgrid using a sample use-case scenario.
Tianlu Gao, Wei Gao, Jun Jason Zhang, Wenzhong David Gao
With the installed capacities of Distributed Generations (DGs) dramatically increasing in power systems from Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) such as hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass, the operation methods of DERs tradings or transactions become more and more complicated. However, the energy market of DERs in Microgrids (MGs) is still under devolvement due to low security and transparency at present. Therefore, a small-scale microgrid energy market is proposed in this study based on Decentralized Autonomous Organization of Parallel, Integrity, Longevity, and Transparency (PILT-DAO) of the features of the blockchain. The microgrid owners can complete the transaction in the PILT-DAO market. In order to implement this energy trading platform, the first step is to simulate a modified distributed IEEE 13 node test feeders system. The next step is to develop a price mechanism method based on a consensus + innovation distributed algorithm to calculate the distributed Distribution Locational Marginal Price (DLMP). At the meantime, smart meters record the Power Flow (PF) data of each DG as one node of the whole simulated distributed power system and send them to blockchain including distributed price and power generation data. The third step is to constitute a decentralized autonomous market by programming smart contracts in Ethereum DAO, running in an artificial system parallelly. A case study of a small-scale microgrid energy market based on PILT-DAO is illustrated followed by the conclusion.
Muhammad Faizan, Thomas Brenner, Felix Foerster, Christof Wittwer · 5 authors
In the past decade, there has been a significant increase in distributed energy resources. This transformation has rendered the grid more bidirectional and transformed many small consumers into prosumers. However, these small power producers are not able to optimize their revenue since, currently, they can only sell to local energy suppliers or opt to sell at a fixed feed-in tariff. If intermediaries are eliminated from energy trading, both individual buyers and prosumers can increase their profitability. Blockchain technology could facilitate this scenario. In this paper, the simulated environment of a hierarchical energy trading market using Ethereum’s smart-contract technology is created as a proof-of-concept of using blockchain technology in energy trading. A dynamic grid fee based on electrical network loading is calculated to demonstrate an economic incentive for agents to have flexible load demand as well as to promote local resource utilization. The price volatility of cryptocurrency is addressed by designing a specific energy token for the model.
Lehlogonolo P. I. Ledwaba, Gerhard P. Hancke, Sherrin J. Isaac, Hein S. Venter
The ability for the smart microgrid to allow for the independent generation and distribution of electrical energy makes it an attractive solution towards enabling universal access to electricity within developing economies. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are being considered as an enabling technology for the secure energy trade market however the high processing, energy and data exchange requirements may make them unsuitable for the Industrial Internet of Things technologies used in the implementation of the microgrid and the limited connectivity infrastructure in developing technologies. This work serves to assess the suitability of DLTs for IIoT edge node operation and as a solution for the microgrid energy market by considering node transaction times, operating temperature, power consumption, processor and memory useage, in addition to mining effort and end user costs.
Modern power systems face different challenges such as the ever-increasing electrical energy demand, the massive growth of renewable energy with distributed generations, the large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) devices adaptation, the emerging cyber-physical security threats, and the main goal of maintaining the system's stability and reliability. These challenges pose extreme pressure on finding advanced technologies and sustainable solutions for secure and reliable operations of the power system. The blockchain is one of the recent technologies that have gained lots of attention in different applications including smart grid for its uniqueness and decentralized nature. In the last few years, this technology grew a momentum specifically with the cryptocurrencies' industry such as the Bitcoin and Etherium. The Blockchain's applications in the smart grids could offer many innovative and affordable solutions to some of the challenges that the future and the current smart grids will be facing. This paper reviews different prospects, advantages, approaches, and technical challenges of utilizing the blockchain technology in the smart grid, and presents frameworks for key smart grid blockchain-based applications; more specifically, it is shown that how the blockchain can be used as the smart grid's cyber-physical layer.
Ali Dorri, Ambrose Hill, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak · 6 authors
Blockchain is increasingly being used as a distributed, anonymous, trustless framework for energy trading in smart grids. However, most of the existing solutions suffer from reliance on Trusted Third Parties (TTP), lack of privacy, and traffic and processing overheads. In our previous work, we have proposed a Secure Private Blockchain-based framework (SPB) for energy trading to address the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we present a proof-on-concept implementation of SPB on the Ethereum private network to demonstrates SPB's applicability for energy trading. We benchmark SPB's performance against the relevant state-of-the-art. The implementation results demonstrate that SPB incurs lower overheads and monetary cost for end users to trade energy compared to existing solutions.
Saeid Esmaeili, Shahram Jadid, Amjad Anvari‐Moghaddam, Josep M. Guerrero
In this paper, optimal operational scheduling in smart microgrids in conjunction with hourly reconfiguration is investigated. The optimization problem has the objective function of minimizing total costs including the total loss, cost of bilateral contracts with fuel cell and photovoltaic owners, switching cost, and cost of exchanged power with wholesale market. To prevent the aged and risky switches from frequent switching actions over a short-term scheduling, a new index for switching action based on the remotely-controlled switch (RCS) ages and critical locations in the network is defined. The proposed optimization model is non-convex and non-linear, which is transformed into a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem to be solvable with conventional solvers. The satisfactory performance of the proposed model is demonstrated on the 84-bus Taiwan power company system.
The paper presents the concept of renewable energy management system. The idea behind the system is to exploit the potential of renewable energy generation sources so as to provide additional energy services and participation in a competitive energy market. These actions can significantly affect the shortening of the period of return on investment of individual customer in renewable energy sources. The paper contains a concept of Electricity Consumption and Supply Management System (ECSM) with application of blockchain technology. ECSM provides functionality to monitor and record continuously information about inbound and outbound energy to/from power grid. Except monitoring inbound and outbound energy, solution will provide the possibility to manage in automatic and manual way when energy should be sent to energy grid. Information about inbound/outbound energy will be part of smart contract which will be confirmed and stored in every node.
In this study we proposed a Blockchain-based distributed power generation trading system and its trading mechanism. By utilizing the linear supply bidding we prove that a market under assumption has a competitive equilibrium where each generator within the microgrid maximizes its profit, each load's demand is fulfilled and the welfare of whole microgrid has been maximized. Additionally we introduced a distributed supply bidding algorithm to solve the global welfare optimization. Last but not least, we designed a trading system architecture where each market participant is abstracted as a virtual agent and continuously interacting with each other by exchanging information through a smart power contract. Combining with our distributed algorithm, the microgrid market can reach its competitive equilibrium gradually. A numerical study is conducted on a simplified microgrid to demonstrate the effectiveness of our study.
Cong Nam Truong, Michael Schimpe, Uli Bürger, Holger C. Hesse · 5 authors
This article proposes a basic concept for the multi-use of stationary battery storage systems with multiple stakeholders to improve the economic value of battery storage systems. An auction market is suggested, where segments of the energy storage system and rights of use are auctioned. The blockchain technology is incorporated to develop a generic, low-cost concept that enables distinct obligations between the stakeholders caused by the technical operation of the battery storage system. Smart contracts allow flexible sharing of the battery storage system and increase the system’s utilization ratio in the presence of prediction uncertainties.
The growing interest for decentralized production of renewable energies calls for new market approaches. In this context, the blockchain is considered as a key technology for enabling decentralized local energy markets. Following this idea, several market solutions were proposed by the academic community. However, their technical feasibility or economical viability are yet to be assessed due to the lack of simulation frameworks. In this paper, we propose an agent-based simulation framework to experiment blockchain-backed energy market places. Moreover, based on realistic data of households located in northern France, we perform a sensitivity analysis to assess the impact of parameters on economics and blockchain system performances. Finally, we have implemented our solution on Raspberry Pies IoT devices to measure the actual power consumption of such systems.
In this paper, we address the issue of electricity trading in residential electricity market. In recent years, the residential electricity trading has draw more and more attention, the households that produce excessive electricity sell electricity to households that lack of electricity, however the existence of the manage center brings a huge risk to users, once the center goes crashed, the households will suffer economics losses and there is a great possibility of the leakage of users' personal information. To tackle these issues, we propose a peer-to-peer electricity trading mechanism based on blockchain, under our mechanism each user has a distributed ledger maintained by all households and there is no existence of such a manage center, eliminating the danger of all users suffering huge economic losses when the management center goes crashed. Besides, each user in the market can have multiple virtual addresses that are used to sell and purchase electricity, and other users cansellers submit trading information includes unit pricenot identify their identities via virtual addresses, these virtual addresses protect users' privacy from leaking. The experimental results show the consumption of our proposed mechanism is logical and small, which illustrates the reasonability of our mechanism in time consumption.
Luigi D’Oriano, Giuseppe Mastandrea, Giuseppe Rana, Giuseppe Raveduto · 7 authors
With the diffusion of smart metering devices and the increasing trend in renewable energy investment [1], the electrical grids are rapidly changing towards the adoption of decentralized energy networks in which consumers can be also producers (i.e. prosumers). The increased use of renewable and distributed generation is leading the development of Smart Grid and microgrid technologies. In this context new business opportunities can be developed provided that new critical issues for the traditional operators, introduced by decentralization, are addressed properly. As example, grid imbalances can generate Reverse Power Flow (RPF) that is harmful for the equipment since many of the protection and control devices are designed with the assumption that power always flows in one direction. In this paper, we present results from the ongoing project eDREAM (enabling new Demand REsponse Advanced, Market oriented and Secure technologies, solutions and business models) with some extent on requirements and use cases related a decentralized flexibility system based on ledger technologies.
The prevalence of distributed energy resources encourages the concept of an electricity “Prosumer (Producer and Consumer)”. This paper proposes a distributed electricity trading system to facilitate the peer-to-peer electricity sharing among prosumers. The proposed system includes two layers. In the first layer, a multi-agent system is designed to support the prosumer network, and an agent coalition mechanism is proposed to enable the prosumers to form coalitions and negotiate electricity trading. In the second layer, a Blockchain based transaction settlement mechanism is proposed to enable the trusted and secure settlement of electricity trading transactions formed in the first layer. Simulations are conducted based on the java agent development environment to validate the proposed electricity trading process.
Van Hoa Nguyen, Yvon Bésanger, Quoc Tuan Tran, Minh Tri Le
As more and more distributed renewable energy resources are integrated to the\ngrid, the traditional consumers have become the prosumers who can sell back\ntheir surplus energy to the others who are in energy shortage. This\npeer-to-peer (P2P) energy transaction framework benefits the end users,\nfinancially and in term of energy security; and the network operators, in term\nof flexibility in DRES management, peak load shifting and regulation of\nvoltage/frequency. Environmentally, P2P energy transaction also helps to reduce\ncarbon footprint, reduces DRES payback period and incentivizes the installation\nof DRES. The current centralized market model is no longer suitable and it is\ntherefore necessary to develop an adapted decentralized architecture for the\nadvanced P2P energy transaction framework intra/inter-microgrid. In this paper,\nwe discuss several distributed ledger approaches for such framework:\nBlockchain, Block Lattice and Directed Acyclic Graph (the Tangle). The\ntechnical advantages of these architectures as well as the persistent\nchallenges are then considered.\n