Exploring Blockchain for The Coordination of Distributed Energy Resources

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based distributed coordination system for DERs, enabling trust and efficiency in energy trading and scheduling through a novel smart contract implementation and distributed optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a trustable, blockchain-enabled framework for DER coordination, integrating ADMM with smart contracts for secure distributed energy management.

Findings

The proposed system effectively coordinates DERs using blockchain technology.

Experimental results validate the efficiency and trustworthiness of the distributed algorithm.

The approach reduces costs and improves energy trading among DERs.

Abstract

The fast growth of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as distributed renewables (e.g., rooftop PV panels), energy storage systems, electric vehicles, and controllable appliances, drives the power system toward a decentralized system with bidirectional power flow. The coordination of DERs through an aggregator, such as a utility, system operator, or a third-party coordinator, emerges as a promising paradigm. However, it is not well understood how to enable trust between the aggregator and DERs to integrate DERs efficiently. In this paper, we develop a trustable and distributed coordination system for DERs using blockchain technology. We model various DERs and formulate a cost minimization problem for DERs to optimize their energy trading, scheduling, and demand response. We use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve the problem in a distributed fashion. To implement the distributed algorithm in a trustable way, we design a smart contract to update multipliers and communicate with DERs in a blockchain network. We validate our design by experiments using real-world data, and the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.