Abstract
Hardware solutions based on blockchain used in peer-to-peer electricity trading operations have been on rise during the last years. It is expected that due to their usage, it will become easier for prosumers to participate in the power grid on more equal terms when compared to the traditional players that have been settled in this market for the last decades. However, devices used to fully integrate prosumers are scarce and often offer minimal functionalities to perform the task of becoming integrated in those markets. This manuscript puts forward a Constrained Hardware Device enhanced with several software elements related to blockchain and cloud infrastructures, which make possible for any electricity generator or storage system to perform major actions like executing smart contracts, requesting energy prices to a Transmission System Operator and replicating the interchanged data in a cloud computing environment in case there are blockchain node failures. In this way, Renewable Energy Sources can be integrated by means of inexpensive, reliable devices with all the required software components preinstalled, with prosumers being able to further intervene in energy markets.
Highlights
The integration of Internet of Things and smart grid paradigms is leading the transformation of the power supply market across the world
The use of a public blockchain where every stakeholder is allowed to audit the energy market will lead to a more transparent and fair market where every transaction has the potential of being public and open to consult. This manuscript takes into account all these features of electricity trade, how it is distributed and how it is paid for by putting forward a lightweight device that we refer to a Constrained Hardware Device (CHD) used to perform all the functionalities related to obtaining energy prices from Transmission System Operator (TSO), deploying a smart contract with several energy features and triggering it whenever there is another party that meets the terms that have been put forward
There are two more software components that have been located at the CHD: one is the TSO Application Programming Interface (API) Access point, used to retrieve information regarding energy prices obtained from the TSO via calls to the API that they usually offer to external entities, and a Cloud API Access point, that is pushing information into the cloud for high amounts of data storage
Summary
The integration of Internet of Things and smart grid paradigms is leading the transformation of the power supply market across the world. While complex data interchange is not anything new in the IoT or in distributed, Cyber-Physical Systems [3], the addition of data that is legally liable is a novelty offered by smart contracts that should not be overlooked by any means As it can be seen, as far as energy trade is concerned, there are three main actors: end users or prosumers that are able and willing to interact with the energy markets according to business models beneficial to them [4], the electricity markets where trade currently takes place and their Renewable Energy Sources (RES) used to generate the good -in this case energy- that will be traded. The possibilities that a) cloud facilities offer as a way to have a distributed data backup and b) the nature of smart contracts, that require no central authority to be executed and enforced, have been taken into account in this paper
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