Transactive Energy, Energy Market, & Blockchain

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Written by Hossam A.Gabbar and Yasser Elsayed

The operating conditions of power systems are changing continuously. These changes reduce the life cycle of the expensive power network equipment and impact the revenue and reliability of the overall electrical power supply system. Failure of windings in power transformers lead to disruption in power supply and accidents.

Written by Sri Nikhil Gupta Gourisetti1, Umit Cali2, Farrokh Rahimi3, Claudio Lima4, Hayden Reeve1, and D. Sebastian Cardenas1

Transactive energy market researchers have been exploring blockchain’s capabilities to enforce secure transactions that prevent repudiation, maintain user privacy, and ensure the confidentiality and integrity of all transactions. Despite blockchain’s promise to act as a trust anchor between disparate entities to enable distributed energy market architectures, some of questions about the long-term challenges for a production-ready blockchain solution pertaining to scalability, interoperability, and security remain largely unanswered.

Written by  Soham Ghosh and Raj Sekhar Dutta

Industries in the energy sector have seen a genuine impetus to bridge to a democratized transactive energy ecosystem, with blockchain’s growing maturity. Under such an ecosystem, IoT devices will interact securely, fulfill transactions, and execute commands thereby bringing new capabilities to the existing financial and physical framework of the networked power systems. With these self-executing automated smart contracts will come better transparency in energy transactions. However, the challenge is to adopt a standardized market bidding process that is secure and energy-efficient. In this article, we have highlighted how existing blockchain consensus protocols could be made more energy-efficient and secure. Going forward, the most important long-term focus for electric utilities and users would be to bridge to a democratized blockchain-based transactive energy ecosystem where networked microgrids and regular independent systems operators participate equally in real-time transactions. However, the starting point would most likely begin at the distribution level with networked microgrids. The blockchain transactive ecosystem of the future will be governed through codes, standardization, peer-to-peer connectivity, and collaboration without the need for intermediaries or agents. In terms of standardization, ‘IEEE P2418.5 - Standard for Blockchain in Energy’ which is currently under development will serve as one of the prominent guidelines for blockchain’s scalability, performance, and security.

 

Written by James Kempf and Tamara Hughes

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading is a prominent use case for blockchain for transactive energy (BCTE) and the results of several high-profile BCTE P2P pilots from the mid-2010s have been widely published. Despite regulations in many regions of the world allowing P2P energy trading, the BCTE pilots have not resulted in wide-spread deployment. And in North America, the prevailing regulatory regime prohibits P2P energy trading. The 2018 GridWise Architecture Council document outlining recommendations for research, development, and deployment on transactive energy provides no recommendations for BCTE applications [1]. However, there are use cases beyond P2P energy trading that can benefit from the decentralized trust and security properties that BCTE technology provides. In this article, we briefly describe two nonpeer-to-peer use cases and highlight progress on advancements that mitigate arguments against using blockchain for transactive energy. The selected use cases are outcomes of discussions in the BCTE Task Force which was a subgroup of the IEEE 2418.5 Blockchain Energy standardization group.

 

Written by Vikash Kumar Saini, Shashank Vyas, Sujil A, and Rajesh Kumar

The transformation of the power grid from conventional to smart is being driven by an underlying transition towards sustainability for which a secure and systematic way of integrating renewable and non-conventional energy resources is essential. Further, the internet-based smart grid is paving the way for a group of innovative technologies, collectively being called as the ‘energy internet’, to ensure that the demand for energy is met at any instant of time. Reiterating, the main objective of this change is to enable a sustainable energy system. The integration of Information Technology (IT) with Operational Technology (OT) is at the crux of a smart grid although, however, the integration and centralized management of various actors like smart meters, Renewable Energy (RE) sources, Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), loads, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices etc. is a major challenge. The smart grid is moving towards a decentralized paradigm from a centralized topology to effectively integrate more and more resources spread across time and space in such a way that quality services are provided to the end customer without compromising on the integrity of all the stakeholders including the utility grid. With large scale energy and information transactions over the smart grid, cyber-security is becoming equally crucial. The blockchain technology possesses several outstanding attributes which provides an excellent platform for smart grid security and privacy. In this article, an overview of blockchain for decentralized energy transactions in a smart grid setup has been provided.


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