Switching energy suppliers can be a time consuming process and the manner in which permissions regarding consumer data are stored lacks transparency. To overcome these issues, a solution was proposed in the form of a mandate register. Said register keeps track of which consumer gave what permission, regarding energy data, to whom. In this project a prototype of such a register was built. The register is required to be designed in such a way that it is expandable and secure. From these characteristics, the conclusion was drawn that a permissioned blockchain network was the most suitable option for storing mandates in a decentralised and immutable fashion. The most fitting consensus algorithm for the blockchain network was determined to be the Raft algorithm. For implementation of the blockchain network, a widely-documented and advanced framework called Hyperledger Fabric was used, which was be configured to use Raft. A network in Hyperledger Fabric is a set of organisations of which subsets can form channels together. Each organisation consists of multiple peer nodes, each with a corresponding ledger, database and smart contracts. The mandate register network consists of two channels, the first containing seven organisations, with two peer nodes per organisation. Apart from these seven organisations, the network contains seven orderers, which work in the second channel and which are responsible for managing transactions made by an application. On top of the network, an application was built that connects to the network and functions as a simple web server. The web server allows consumers to submit their mandates as input to the network and query mandates from the network. Performance evaluation of the network shows that it requires much optimisation before being ready for deployment in the real world. Apart from optimisation, there are various tasks related to security, authentication, deployment, and the GDPR which have to be completed before the register can be used in production. ... Read more

We witness the rise of prosumers: consumers that produce a surplus of energy that can be sup- plied back into the grid. However, for energy-trade between prosumers and consumers, a cen- tralized and undesirable middle-man is still necessary. We developed a method to decentralize essential aspects of energy distribution between households. Macro-grids are divided into vari- ous neighborhood sized community-grids; a micro-grid. A micro-grid as a community yields a degree of self-sustainability. Nevertheless, micro-grids currently still possess centralized elements. The presence of central controllers, trading-agents or banks, maintains this undesirable situation. Decentralization of a power-grid increases end-user autonomy, independency and fairness in the system.
We propose to establish a truly transactive micro-grid: decentralized in its energy distribution, control and money-flow by deploying EnergyBazaar, a distributed trading algorithm. Concepts of game theory are used in the design to enable EnergyBazaar to solve the economic dispatch problem: agents want to individually optimize their social welfare, while the collective task is to stabilize the grid. Micro-grids make use of a decoupled hierarchical structure: primary control is responsible for fast dynamics of voltage and frequency, secondary control coordinates the economics within the micro-grid. In its core, EnergyBazaar coordinates inverter-based droop parameters within the Energy Storage System (ESS) of each agent, managing their charging/discharging behaviour. A trade-off is identified between economical gain and the necessity of surviving energy scarcity. For this, energy patterns are predicted and acted upon. In contrast to a coordinator dictating a centralized solution, EnergyBazaar creates a free market, where agents individually converge to a global Nash equilibrium. A comparison is made to show performance of both.
By rejecting centralized institutions in the micro-grid, trust challenges are introduced: achieving decentralized money-flows, the necessity of shared information during distributed optimization and the manipulation of the free-market by malicious agents. We introduce an approach of mitigating these issues in a decentralized paradigm by embedding EnergyBazaar in a smart-contract deployed on a blockchain platform. ... Read more