Smart contract formation enabling energy‐as‐a‐service in a virtual power plant

Sambeet Mishra,Chiara Bordin,Jordi Mateo‐Fornés,Cletus John Crasta

doi:10.1002/er.7381

Abstract

Energy as a service (EaaS) is an emerging business model that enables the otherwise passive energy consumers to play an active role and participate in the energy utility services. This platform is formed through smart contracts registering peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions of energy through price and quantity. Many industries, including finance, have already leveraged smart contracts to introduce digital currencies. At this time, the utility industry is faced with the challenge of how to structure smart contract formation in a local energy market. Specifically, they are faced with the challenge of maintaining a balance between energy generation and demand while enabling traceability, security, and unbiased peer-to-peer energy transactions, especially within a virtual power plant. This article aims at addressing the aforementioned challenges. In particular, this article investigates how to structure the microgrids in a local energy market, and how to ensure balance and resiliency with incomplete information. Taking various generation asset dimensions and demand profiles into account, simulations are performed. A novel evolutionary computing strategy to structure the simulation is proposed. A comparison is made among random order, random selection, profit-based ranking, and evolutionary strategy for coordinating the contract formation. The discussions draw attention to each method's advantages and disadvantages in terms of their value as a strategy for forming smart contracts in a local energy market.

Highlights

The current environmental challenges due to global warming, together with the increasing prevalence of renewable resources, are behind the rapid emergence of distributed energy systems
Distributed energy systems represent a paradigm shift, as they provide consumers with opportunities to reduce costs and can increase revenues through local generation and load management. This customer-centric paradigmatic shift is the main impetus behind the modern concept of energy as a service (EaaS) that is recently discussed in the literature
From the results for both summer and winter seasons, a pattern clearly emerges for every test set that shows the Stand-Alone Sequential consensus methodology always underperforms compared to the other “Linked” consensus methodologies in terms of the cumulative total profits

Summary

Introduction

The current environmental challenges due to global warming, together with the increasing prevalence of renewable resources, are behind the rapid emergence of distributed energy systems. The electric distribution system at or near the end users Since they are characterized by multi-generation and have an emphasis on clean energy and low emissions, they are increasingly attracting attention.[2] Distributed energy systems represent a paradigm shift, as they provide consumers with opportunities to reduce costs and can increase revenues through local generation and load management. This customer-centric paradigmatic shift is the main impetus behind the modern concept of energy as a service (EaaS) that is recently discussed in the literature

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Results

Conclusion