Abstract
The deployment of small-scale renewable energy sources will transform the management of energy grids towards more decentralized solutions in which the prosumers will have a more active role. Regulatory and market barriers are driving the implementation of virtual aggregation models in which the small-scale prosumers work together on a larger scale to gain benefits that could not be obtained on an individual basis. In this paper, we propose to use public blockchain and self-enforcing smart contracts to construct Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) of prosumers to provide energy services. A model has been defined for capturing the prosumer level constraints in terms of available energy profiles and energy service requirements enabling their optimal aggregation in hierarchical structures. A lightweight decentralized solution for VPPs construction is implemented using smart contracts enabling its efficient running on the public blockchain. Smart contracts are encoding the model constraints and are defining functionalities for prosumers to initiate or join a VPP implementing the complete chain of Offer-Operate-Measure-Remunerate actions. The VPP will be managed on top of a distributed ledger technology offering decentralized functionality for tracking and validating the delivery of energy based on the blockchain transactions and for energy and financial settlement, the remuneration being done according to the amount of energy provided by individual prosumers. Experimental results show that the proposed solution runs successfully on the public blockchain with good execution time and can address Balancing Responsible Party requests for additional generation. The overhead in terms of gas consumption and transactional throughput stays within reasonable boundaries.
Highlights
The deployment of small-scale renewable energy resources had enabled the adoption of new business models in which the producers and consumers are enabled to participate in the management of the energy system
Nowadays regulatory and economic factors are driving the implementation of virtual aggregation models in which the small-scale prosumers work together on a larger scale to gain benefits that could not be achieved on an individual basis [1]
The Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) construction optimization decentralization in a peer-to-peer energy trading network is inspired by the recursive implementation of a greedy algorithm for solving the Knapsack problem proposed in [41], [42] that either checks the solution with an item or discards the item and tries with a item
Summary
The deployment of small-scale renewable energy resources had enabled the adoption of new business models in which the producers and consumers (prosumers) are enabled to participate in the management of the energy system. A lightweight decentralized solution for VPPs construction using hierarchical structures and smart contracts enabling its efficient running completely on a public blockchain It allows to couple prosumer smart energy meter with a self-enforcing smart contract that will define as rules the prosumer energy constraints and preferences such as time of delivery and energy price. Energy market or service level objectives are injected as business rules into the prosumers’ smart contracts to set the amount of energy to be delivered This will provide the decentralized functionalities for VPP operation such as aggregate and offer before gate closure by using energy transactions stored in a blockchain and the near real-time validation, settlement, and remuneration according to the amount of energy provided by individual prosumers. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the existing state of the art literature in the area of decentralized management of VPPs, Section III details the proposed VPP model, Section IV presents the blockchainbased solution for organizing and managing prosumers in VPPs, Section V presents relevant experiments and results and Section VI concludes the paper
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