Abstract
The world is moving towards distributed renewable energy sources to reduce greenhouse
gas emission and these distributed renewable energy sources are integrated into the
conventional grid, thus making the management of the power grid extremely complex.
The new grid (smart grid) now consists of different participants who at some point in time,
are able to generate more electricity than their load requirement and would want to feed
the surplus electricity into the power grid. Hence, they become prosumers who are able
to generate and consume electricity at the same time. Taking advantage of the power of
blockchain to manage the smart grid, it is possible for prosumers to trade energy to peers
in the smart grid without the need of a third party. The prosumers can be grouped together
to form a microgrid and managed using a decentralized blockchain based architecture.
Management of these microgrid has become a major problem.
This research proposed a decentralized blockchain based (DBD) architecture for
balancing and managing microgrids in a smart grid by allowing distributed energy
producers (DEPs) or prosumers to trade their excess energy to their nearest neighbors
that have shortage of energy. The proposed DBD architecture is implemented using a
distributed supply operator (DSO) to manage the microgrid and facilitate trading of energy
between peers until the microgrid is balanced. Key elements of the microgrid and their
functionality are simulated in a smart contract. The elements that were simulated are IoT
smart meters, solar panels, DEPs and DSOs. The decentralized blockchain mechanism
is proposed to provide a reliable, transparent, and secure financial settlement between
peers in the microgrid. In the proposed approach, electricity consumption information
collected through IoT smart metering devices for each peer in the microgrid is used to
initiate demand response signal and a consensus-based validation is used to activate
financial settlement in almost real-time.
A prototype was developed to simulate the peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing between
the prosumers (DEPs) in the microgrid. The prototype shows how excess energy is traded
to prosumers who are in need and the financial settlement after each energy transaction
is initiated. The financial settlement in this research study is done using cyber currency
(Ether). The proposed prototype is implemented using Ethereum platform and the language used is Solidity. The validation results were acquired by deploying the
blockchain locally on my computer and for better user interface (UI) interactions, the
blockchain was deployed on Remix online platform. The results show that microgrids can
be balance in real time, therefore balancing the entire smart grid that is made up of
multiple microgrids. The algorithm can balance microgrids of any size and can balance
multiple microgrids.
KEY WORDS: Prosumer, Blockchain, Micro grid, Renewable Energy, Internet of Things.