To facilitate the widespread adoption of clean energy, we must devise practical economic incentives to deploy clean energy assets while reducing barriers to access that clean energy. While renewable energy credits and carbon offset credits successfully push these goals forward, the associated accounting and management systems still suffer from numerous flaws that drive costs up and slow the monetization of clean energy assets. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution that can provide a secure and transparent distributed ledger, while autonomously executing transactions upon fulfillment of pre-defined criteria (“smart contracts”). As a result, credits can be easily tracked from generation through ownership trades to ultimate redemption. This leaves a simple audit trail, significantly reducing the associated time and cost, and enables producers to monetize their credits immediately after generation. Clean Energy Blockchain Network (CEBN) has recently announced a partnership with the Silicon valley power, where we will apply blockchain technology to simplify their participation in the low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) program. This real-world deployment will demonstrate how blockchain technology can dramatically simplify extremely complex trading environments and enable the practical implementation of valuable programs such as LCFS that financially incentivize clean energy production and use.
The state parameters of electrical equipment and power system control parameters are the key data to realize the precise control and cooperative autonomy of a cyber physical power system. The trustworthiness of the data is the primary condition to guarantee the electric power system’s safe and reliable operation. In the traditional centralized data acquisition and management architecture, the security and trustworthiness completely depend on the central main server. A small mistake in the main server will result in data loss, which is irreversible and fatal. Blockchain technique combines the dispersed data with mutual backup and retrieval mechanism, which guarantees that the data cannot be tampered with and forged privately. Based on the blockchain technology, this article proposes a novel data trustworthy acquisition model with high credibility, applied to a self-organized cyber physical power system. In order to overcome the long time-consuming process of building traditional blockchains, a new on-demand data transmission routing algorithm with M/M/1/k queuing model is proposed in this article. Different scales of IEEE standard bus systems are employed as experimental examples to evaluate the algorithm’s performance. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively shorten the time consumption of blockchain construction and realize the data trustworthiness of cyber physical power system.
As an important part of the smart grid, the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) can provide various auxiliary services for the power grid and promote the use of renewable resources. However, there are various kinds of attacks in the V2G network. Based on consortium blockchain, this paper proposes a cross-domain authentication scheme for the security threat in the V2G network. This paper designs the trust model and the system architecture, and describes the scheme in detail. The signature and authentication of the scheme adopt the SM9 identity-based cryptographic algorithm. This scheme utilizes the fact that block chain technology is not easy to tamper with. It uses a hash algorithm to verify the certificate, reducing the number of public key algorithm signatures and verifications, making the solution efficient and scalable. The introduction of block chain technology provides new ideas and methods for solving the security problems in the Smart Grid.
Mehmet Demir, Atefeh Mashatan, Ozgur Turetken, Alexander Ferworn
There are various compelling use cases of blockchain technology in the energy and utility sector. We survey the benefits and challenges of blockchain technology on these use cases. Most of these cases focus on the trade of energy. We introduce a novel use case on transparent disaster recovery from service disruptions. We describe the actors on the system, identify trust issues, and show the benefits of using blockchain in this use case.
The decentralization, transparency, fairness and openness of blockchain technology are consistent with the concept of energy Internet, which can effectively solve the problems of data authenticity, trust crisis in the energy Internet system. Firstly, the market architecture, operation mechanism and existing problems of the energy Internet are introduced, then the characteristics of the blockchain technology and its consistency with the energy Internet are discussed, then typical applications of blockchain technology in energy Internet trading system, distributed energy industry and electric vehicle industry are introduced. Finally, the challenges faced by blockchain technology in the energy Internet are analyzed and a conclusion is given.
Future electricity distribution grids will host a considerable share of variable renewable energy sources, such as roof photo voltaic and small wind power. The households will progressively become prosumers playing an active role on localized peer-to-peer electricity trading. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that enables households to autonomously exchange energy with neighbors based on blockchain techniques, aimed to locally balancing renewable energy production.
This paper gives a definition of collective self-consumption and introduces the current regulatory framework in some European countries. It proposes a review of relevant Demand Side Management (DSM) methods applicable to improve the collective self-consumption rate. It also introduces the concept of blockchain and its possible applications to collective self-consumption, with a focus on some current experimentations. Current blockchain applications include validation of measured data and energy transactions. New architectures propose a completely decentralized energy market and grid control based on the blockchain technology. However, a deeper analysis of the benefit of blockchain is required. The legal framework will also play a role on the future deployment of these applications.
Energy deficiency and carbon emission are two increasingly grave issues recently. Energy Internet (EI), as a promising solution, has received extensive attentions globally. Among numerous key technologies and practice of EI, vehicle to grid (V2G) provides a feasible solution to reduce the level of demand-supply mismatch by leveraging the bidirectional energy-trading capabilities of electric vehicles (EVs). In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient V2G energy trading framework by exploring blockchain and edge computing. First, we develop a consortium blockchain-based secure energy trading mechanism for V2G. Then, edge computing has been incorporated to improve the successful probability of block creation. The computational resource allocation problem is modeled as a two-stage Stackelberg leader-follower game, and the optimal strategies are obtained by using the backward induction approach. Finally, the performance of the proposed framework is validated via numerical results and theoretical analysis.
The growing adoption of photovoltaic panels on roof-tops increases the pressure on grid operators for offsetting surplus or deficiency in generation. A multi-carrier energy system allows energy to be converted and stored using different energy carriers, thus relieving the stress from grid operators. However, these systems require efficient operation to unfold their full potential. This paper proposes a novel blockchain-enabled process to coordinate, allocate, and settle intra-day energy transactions in a district multi-carrier energy system with electricity and heating sub-networks. An incentive mechanism is designed for an optimal allocation of local green energy generation. The mechanism is implemented for the Ethereum blockchain and operates fully on-chain. The design leaves energy producers the freedom to choose their preferred pricing strategy for profit maximization while restricting them to behavior favoring the common good. We test three pricing strategies, with different levels of knowledge on users’ pricing behaviors, that energy producers may adopt. The price-availability-based allocation system guarantees consumers the lowest possible cost.
Pietro Danzi, Sarah Hambridge, Čedomir Stefanović, Petar Popovski
In the power grid, the Balance Responsible Parties (BRPs) purchase energy based on a forecast of the user consumption. The forecasts are imperfect, and the corrections of their real-time deviations are managed by a System Operator (SO), which charges the BRPs for the procured imbalances. Flexible consumers, associated with a BRP, can be involved in a demand response (DR) program to reduce the imbalance costs. However, running the DR program requires the BRP to invest resources in the infrastructure and increases its operating costs. To limit the intervention of BRP, we implement the DR via a blockchain smart contract. Moreover, to reduce the delay of publication of the imbalance price, caused by the inefficient accounting process of the current balancing markets, a second blockchain is adopted at the SO layer, procuring a fast and auditable credit settlements. The feasibility of the proposed architecture is evaluated over an Ethereum blockchain platform. The results show that block chains can enable a high automation of the balancing market, by providing (i) the implementation of aggregators with low operating cost and (ii) the timely and transparent access to the balancing information, thus fostering new business models for the BRPs.
Manisa Pipattanasomporn, Murat Kuzlu, Saifur Rahman
Over the last decade, the increasing uptake of rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) at the grid edge transforms residential houses into complex energy "prosumers". A house with rooftop solar PV can both consume and export electricity. Hence, it can participate in a "Transactive Energy" network involving peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange of excess electricity. The challenge is to keep track of these transactions and compensate buyers and sellers accordingly. Recently, blockchain has emerged as a distributed ledger technology which allows exchanges among participants without the need for a central market entity. There are several blockchain pilots in the energy sector, which focus on the business, legal and financial aspects, but without much details about how to implement a blockchain-based P2P trading platform. This paper addresses this issue by presenting laboratory-scale implementation of a blockchain network for exchange of solar electricity among participants using Hyperledger - an open-source collaborative effort. Participants, assets and transactions necessary to establish the blockchain-based network for keeping track of solar PV output exchanges are described, together with the smart contract, use cases and their implementation.
Astrid Nieße, Norman Ihle, Stephan Balduin, Matthias Postina · 6 authors
Congestion management in distribution grids is an important task for distribution grid operators, both from a financial and a technological perspective. Whereas large generation units and large controllable loads might in general be controllable in a manual way, this is no option for small distributed generators and loads. With flexibility control in multiple owner scenarios, documentation, transparency and automation are of crucial importance. In this work, we present a fully automated congestion management approach based on a combination of distributed ledger technology and distributed algorithms in an agent-based architectural approach. We present a case study focused on the visualization of the concept and discuss the advantages and possible challenges for this approach. Whereas distributed ledger technology has been introduced for peer-to-peer energy trading within the last years, no similar approach has been presented yet for stable distribution grid management.
Jaysson Guerrero, Archie C. Chapman, Gregor Verbič
The increasing uptake of distributed energy resources (DERs) in distribution systems and the rapid advance of technology have established new scenarios in the operation of low-voltage networks. In particular, recent trends in cryptocurrencies and blockchain have led to a proliferation of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading schemes, which allow the exchange of energy between the neighbors without any intervention of a conventional intermediary in the transactions. Nevertheless, far too little attention has been paid to the technical constraints of the network under this scenario. A major challenge to implementing P2P energy trading is that of ensuring that network constraints are not violated during the energy exchange. This paper proposes a methodology based on sensitivity analysis to assess the impact of P2P transactions on the network and to guarantee an exchange of energy that does not violate network constraints. The proposed method is tested on a typical UK low-voltage network. The results show that our method ensures that energy is exchanged between users under the P2P scheme without violating the network constraints, and that users can still capture the economic benefits of the P2P architecture.
With the rapid development of distributed renewable energy (DRE), demand response (DR) programs, and the proposal of the energy internet, the current centralized trading of the electricity market model is unable to meet the trading needs of distributed energy. As a decentralized and distributed accounting mode, blockchain technology fits the requirements of distributed energy to participate in the energy market. Corresponding to the transaction principle, a blockchain-based integrated energy transaction mechanism is proposed, which divides the trading process into two stages: the call auction stage and the continues auction stage. The transactions among the electricity and heat market participants were used as examples to explain the details of the trading process. Finally, the smart contracts of the transactions were designed and deployed on the Ethereum private blockchain site to demonstrate the validity of the proposed transaction scheme.
The penetration of renewable energy resources and demand response programs causes several management issues, such as network instability. Several research projects are currently investigating and surveying several methods to enhance the network reliability. This paper represents a smart model of community grid that contains a central management unit and several consumers, producers and prosumers. In the proposed model, the community manager is able to control the consumption and generation of the resources by establishing contracts with its members. The community manager utilizes a single period optimization problem for minimizing its operation costs by applying different types of demand response programs and the use of renewable resources. In the case study, an internal low voltage distribution network of a real university campus is considered as the community grid, in order to test and validate the proposed model.
Ferdinando Bosco, Vincenzo Croce, Giuseppe Raveduto
In the last years the interest around blockchain technologies is increasing. The peculiarity of this technology is to offer some relevant features as decentralization, transparency and reliability by design. Initially the application field was principally the financial one, but over the time many others have been investigated. In this paper we are reporting a real case of study in the financial sector, applied to the renewable energy exchange in a local district. In particular, this study reports the development of a Financial Platform, based on a private implementation of Ethereum blockchain, that enables a series of services for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) investments. The Platform implements a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) trustable energy marketplace, price-based, addressing both the RES Financial investors and the district energy prosumers. The amounts of energy exchanged and their monetary counter values are represented by specific “tokens”, automatically exchanged by participants to track and record trades, ensuring auditability. The financial services offered to the investors range from an investment performance monitoring to more complex models of shared revenues and equity. The marketplace and all the participants within the microgrid are nodes of the blockchain. All the platform features were implemented exploiting Ethereum smart contracts, ensuring trustworthiness and transparency.
Local energy markets could play a very important role in future electric power systems, allowing small electricity producers/consumers to trade within a small geographical area. In this context, an important challenge to allow the proper operation of a local energy market is to devise efficient and economic computational platforms in charge of data storage, data communication, and any other relevant computational requirements. Fortunately, the recent developments in blockchain-based mechanisms open up promising approaches that can support the effective management of local energy markets. In fact, blockchain technology allows, in particular, to carry out decentralised payments without involving a third party in charge of keeping track of the trades performed, which can potentially simplify and enhance the management of a local energy market significantly. Motivated by this, this paper will study the use of the blockchainbased Ethereum platform as the computational support for a local energy market. Specifically, this paper addresses the scalability of this platform in terms of number of participants in the local energy market, and in terms of trading frequency. With this purpose, computer simulations are carried out for a market that consists of day-ahead trading and real-time trading. The day-ahead mechanism trades energy quantities in such a way that flexible demand can be shifted to balance inflexible supply, and the real-time mechanism trades energy in such a way that flexible loads cover deviations from the day-ahead settlement. The results illustrate that the Ethereum platform is sufficiently scalable, allowing to manage a local energy market with a large number of participants and a high trading frequency.
In this paper we use the blockchain technology to develop a peer to peer energy trade platform without a trusted third party. Our main contribution is a novel distributed double auction mechanism which allows any peer to act as an auctioneer and the blockchain mechanism ensures that a peer behaves lawfully while acting as an auctioneer. Using experimental evaluation we show that (1) the distributed auction converges quickly, (2) it minimizes energy loss due to long transmission, (3) computational overhead due to employing a blockchain is negligible, (4) it is efficient and (5) it can implement trade restrictions imposed by the energy distribution network.
With the promotion of power energy market reform, it has been a trend to allow distributed energy agents and other multi-subject agents to participate in the market competition. However, due to the existing power market mechanism is designed according to the centralized power supply mode, the public services, power market transaction mechanism and government management system for distributed energy transaction is still more missing. The blockchain technology has the characteristics of decentralization, transparency, fairness, openness and so on. Under the background of the transactive energy system, a decentralized distributed energy transaction mechanism based on blockchain smart contract technology is proposed, which includes auditing, bidding, clearing and settlement. It realizes P2P energy trading among prosumers.
The Energy Internet has become a hot topic for the integration of sustainable energies. However, as a result, there are numerous sustainable energy forms and participants, the system is extremely complex, and some key issues are difficult to overcome, such as the control and management of distributed sustainable energy forms. On the other hand, blockchain technology consists of distributed data storage, peer-to-peer transmission, a consensus mechanism, encryption algorithms, and smart contracts. Applying the technical advantages of the blockchain to the Energy Internet can solve many of the problems that hinder its development. The purpose of this paper is to review the development of blockchain and the Energy Internet, and provide some references for the possible applications of blockchain technology to the Energy Internet. Firstly, the definition and characteristics of blockchain and the Energy Internet are introduced in detail. Secondly, the compatibility of the two is analyzed. Then, several application scenarios of blockchain in the Energy Internet are put forward. Finally, the challenges that still exist when applying the current blockchain technology to the Energy Internet are analyzed.
This paper reports on how the technology behind cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) i.e. Blockchain could offer its services in distributed energy system (DES), noting on the issues related to operating conditions, energy generation monitoring, energy sharing and trading, financial flows, emission inventory, carbon emission trading and many more. Information on blockchain implication in DES is reported.
Ke Zhang, Yuming Mao, Supeng Leng, Yejun He · 8 authors
Due to their environment friendliness, electric vehicles (EVs) are anticipated to form a considerable fraction of vehicles for transportation in smart cities. It is essential to design an electricity charging scheme that takes the utilities of both the charging stations and the EVs into consideration. However, the self-interested nature of the EVs together with the information asymmetry between the energy demand and supply sides makes the design a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a queuing network-based model to characterize the charging process of the multiple EVs in a renewable energy-aided charging station. Based on the model, we adopt a contract theoretic approach to design an optimal charging policy in an information asymmetry scenario. Furthermore, we propose the new contract-based charging rate assignment and admission control schemes that maximize the utility of the charging station under certain charging constraints. To derive the optimal contract, we present a two-step iterative algorithm and prove its convergence. We evaluate the proposed schemes based on the IEEE 69-bus distribution test system. Results indicate that the contract-based charging schemes can effectively benefit both the charging stations and the EVs and concurrently improve the load level of the smart grid.
Jonathan Coignard, Eric Munsing, Jason MacDonald, Jonathan Mather
The increased penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) on the distribution network creates local challenges in balancing consumption and generation. To coordinate the roll-out and the operation of DERs, distribution-level energy markets have been proposed, but there are currently few tools for simulating the operation of DERs in these proposed markets. We present a framework which utilizes a grid co- simulation platform (Mosaik) to simulation DER operation, while simulating market clearing operations with a blockchain network (Ethereum). The use of blockchains, an emerging technology for decentralized computing and data storage, allows us to model secure decentralized execution of market clearing functions and payment processes. By unifying simulation of market clearing rules and the physical grid, we are able to ensure that economic incentives are aligned with physical constraints, helping facilitate the development of more effective distributed energy markets. We demonstrate the use of this new simulation platform on a small feeder, for which a market mechanism to incentivize DER integration is explored.