Blockchain Based Transactive Energy Systems for Voltage Regulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a blockchain-based transactive energy system that incentivizes voltage regulation in active distribution networks through smart contracts, reputation management, and automated negotiations, ensuring trustless and auditable transactions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel blockchain framework for TES that enhances incentivization, contract enforcement, and auditability of voltage regulation services in power systems.

Findings

Effective voltage regulation through blockchain incentives

Smart contracts enforce transaction validity and penalties

Experimental validation on real-world distribution networks

Abstract

Transactive Energy Systems (TES) are modern mechanisms in electric power systems that allow disparate control agents to utilize distributed generation units (DGs) to engage in energy transactions and provide ancillary services to the grid. Although voltage regulation is a crucial ancillary service within active distribution networks (ADNs), previous work has not adequately explored how this service can be offered in terms of its incentivization, contract auditability and enforcement. Blockchain technology shows promise in being a key enabler of TES, allowing agents to engage in trustless, persistent transactions that are both enforceable and auditable. To that end, this paper proposes a blockchain based TES that enables agents to receive incentives for providing voltage regulation services by i) maintaining an auditable reputation rating for each agent that is increased proportionately with each mitigation of a voltage violation, ii) utilizing smart contracts to enforce the validity of each transaction and penalize reputation ratings in case of a mitigation failure and iii) automating the negotiation and bidding of agent services by implementing the contract net protocol (CNP) as a smart contract. Experimental results on both simulated and real-world ADNs are executed to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system.