A Blockchain-enabled Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Platform for Managing Complex Exchange of Kilowatt-hours and Negawatts

The structure of the electric utility business has long been a centralized model where an electric utility is the only authority selling electricity to, and buying excess rooftop PV generation, from customers. This is changing as utilities explore new business models including Distributed System Operator (DSO) models. On the other side of the meter, with the increasing penetration of rooftop solar panels, Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and smart meters, several new opportunities on the horizon have emerged that allow buildings to participate in a Transactive energy network, involving peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange of excess solar PV generation (kilowatt-hours) and demand reduction capabilities (negawatts or negative watts). One important challenge of P2P energy trading is the lack of a cost-effective platform to securely track and compensate users for generating power from distributed energy resources (DERs).Although there are several blockchain trials in the energy sector, in all projects including the Brooklyn Microgrid, SolarCoin, LINQ, Blockcharge and WePower, a new set of hardware is needed to measure electricity generation by DERs and provide linkage to a corresponding blockchain network. Another missing element is a means to perform demand reduction, taking into account variation in occupant comfort, and simultaneously tracking negawatt exchanges between any two participants. To address the above challenges, BEM Controls will expand the capabilities of its WiseBldg platform to enable prosumers to participate in the emerging market of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading. WiseBldg is an open architecture platform capable of remote monitoring and control of various IoT devices, with an initial focus on building energy management. Through BEM Controls’ WiseBldg platform, the need to provide new hardware to enable blockchain can be avoided as its platform is hardware agnostic and can directly address PV inverter controllers, battery storage controllers, smart meters and other IoT devices. Hence, by providing an open-architecture blockchain solution, BEM Controls can reduce deployment costs and interconnection times when establishing a new P2P network. As an emerging technology platform, experts have raised concerns regarding the high transaction costs and limited scalability of blockchain- based platform, so the focus of the BEM Controls’ Phase I approach is to design, develop and demonstrate the technical feasibility of the open-architecture blockchain-enabled energy trading platform built on the open-architecture WiseBldg platform. The performance of the proposed platform in terms of its throughput, latency and scalability will be evaluated. The target is to allow the support of at least 10,000 participants with the response time per transaction of less than 1 minute.If the proposed concept is proven to be feasible and scalable in a laboratory environment, BEM Controls will, in Phase II, demonstrate this concept in a real-world pilot project with an electric utility. Phase I work will also focus on developing case studies to demonstrate opportunities for P2P electricity exchange within complex system-level operations, such as performing demand reductions based on different customer preferences, maximizing distribution system load factors, energy savings by adjusting temperature set points, and local voltage control based on large-scale Volt-VAR or Volt-Watt adjustments of smart inverters.