A Blockchain-Based Configuration for Balancing the Electricity Grid with Distributed Assets

Abstract

This paper explores a future perspective to foster the provision of balancing services to the electricity grid by distributed assets. One recent test case, initiated by the Dutch Transmission System Operator (TSO), was to operate an Electric Vehicle (EV) fleet on the automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR) market, which entails fast and automated reserves. To achieve that in a decentralised, automated and transparent manner, the role of blockchain technology for this specific application is explored. We propose a novel configuration that can serve as a basis for deploying distributed assets for aFRR markets using blockchain or any alternative Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Automation can be achieved via the deployment of smart contracts, which also results in transparency in the system. The blockchain configurations are designed for three phases in the aFRR market, namely: (i) Operational planning and scheduling by a balancing service provider (i.e., formulation and submission of aFRR bid), (ii) Real-time operations (i.e., activation and measurements), and iii) Verification and settlement (i.e., imbalance correction and financial settlement). The paper concludes that the scalability of distributed assets that can participate in the system, combined with the large transaction times and energy consumption of some consensus mechanisms, could put limitations on the proposed architecture. Future research should address benchmarking studies of other alternatives (e.g., DLTs, such as the ones based on directed acyclic graphs, and non-DLT solutions) with the proposed blockchain solution.

Short term wholesale electricity market designs: A review of identified challenges and promising solutions

“…In these markets, the flexibility provided by local participants (usually managed by aggregators) is provided to balancing responsible parties (BRPs) to reduce imbalance [68] and to DSOs for congestion management and voltage regulation needs [69]. Alternatively, the work in [72] proposes a blockchain-based configuration that enables DER (more specifically, electric vehicles) to provide balancing services to the Transmission System Operator (TSO). A number of additional local and P2P market designs have been proposed in the literature.…”

Review of Blockchain Potential Applications in the Electricity Sector and Challenges for Large Scale Adoption

“…Therefore, many studies and projects are implemented to investigate the suitability of blockchain for different applications and assess its added value and implementation challenges. Few studies developed preliminary evaluation criteria that can help in deciding if blockchain technology is required for a specific application or other traditional technologies such as databases are more suitable [157], [158]. Fig.…”

Regional Flexibility Markets—Solutions to the European Energy Distribution Grid—A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

“…The community members could then freely decide on the amount of electricity they offer or receive and on the conditions at which they are ready to do this. Gong et al [91] provide a technology to automatically consider framing conditions of the acceptance of decentral provider offers at the DSO level using an electronic bottomup negotiation mechanism based on a master-slave multichain. The system disposes of an additional security check to avoid grid overload and a dispatch management protocol.…”

“…To implement the idea of a flexible regional pricing scheme, a digital platform to trade electricity and interchange grid capacities for supply and feed-in has to be designed under the control of DSO and TSO operators in the style of a semi-central transactive grid first, so that on the one hand market entry barriers for all-equally small and ecological-providers are minimized, while, at the same time, grid stability is ensured. Although this approach has been developed conceptually in diverse studies [91,94,107], its practical implementation across Germany or Europe has never been seriously considered.…”