Eisele, Scott | Engineering Papers

DOE OSTI2020

The Role of Blockchains in Multi-Stakeholder Transactive Energy Systems

Power grids are undergoing major changes due to rapid growth in renewable energy and improvements in battery technology. Prompted by the increasing complexity of power systems, decentralized solutions are emerging that arrange local communities into transactive microgrids. This paper addresses the problem of implementing transactive energy mechanisms in a distributed setting, providing both privacy and safety. Specifically, we design and implement an automated auction and matching system that ensures safety (e.g., satisfaction of line capacity constraints), preserves privacy, and promotes local trade and market efficiency for transactive energy systems. This design problem is challenging because safety, market efficiency, and privacy are competing objectives. We implement our solution as a decentralized trading platform built on blockchain technology and smart contracts. To demonstrate the viability of our platform, we analyze the results of experiments with dozens of embedded devices and energy production and consumption profiles using an actual dataset from the transactive energy domain.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2020

Safe and Private Forward-trading Platform for Transactive Microgrids

Power grids are evolving at an unprecedented pace due to the rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DER) in communities. These resources are very different from traditional power sources, as they are located closer to loads and thus can significantly reduce transmission losses and carbon emissions. However, their intermittent and variable nature often results in spikes in the overall demand on distribution system operators (DSO). To manage these challenges, there has been a surge of interest in building decentralized control schemes, where a pool of DERs combined with energy storage devices can exchange energy locally to smooth fluctuations in net demand. Building a decentralized market for transactive microgrids is challenging, because even though a decentralized system provides resilience, it also must satisfy requirements such as privacy, efficiency, safety, and security, which are often in conflict with each other. As such, existing implementations of decentralized markets often focus on resilience and safety but compromise on privacy. In this article, we describe our platform, called TRANSAX, which enables participants to trade in an energy futures market, which improves efficiency by finding feasible matches for energy trades, enabling DSOs to plan their energy needs better. TRANSAX provides privacy to participants by anonymizing their trading activity using a distributed mixing service, while also enforcing constraints that limit trading activity based on safety requirements, such as keeping planned energy flow below line capacity. We show that TRANSAX can satisfy the seemingly conflicting requirements of efficiency, safety, and privacy. We also provide an analysis of how much trading efficiency is lost. Trading efficiency is improved through the problem formulation, which accounts for temporal flexibility, and system efficiency is improved using a hybrid-solver architecture. Lastly, we describe a testbed to run experiments and demonstrate its performance using simulation results.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗