article · IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy
Distributed energy resources and smart grids enable electricity prosumers to manage power consumption and reduce energy costs. A decentralised mechanism uses blockchain technology to incentivise prosumers to conserve electricity while keeping their consumption data private. Rather than sharing sensitive personal data, each participant calculates and shares an hourly percentage power change. The prosumer recording the lowest percentage change is selected as the block validator to generate the subsequent block in the chain. Network participants approve this validator through a newly formulated zero-metric weighted average consensus model. Analytical derivation and simulations across multiple test networks with varying numbers of prosumers confirm that the approach successfully supports energy conservation, safeguards privacy, and maintains system scalability.
As households increasingly generate and consume their own renewable electricity, coordinating grid demand becomes essential. Conventional demand management often requires sharing granular consumption data, which compromises personal privacy. By using percentage changes in power rather than raw usage figures to reward efficiency and maintain the blockchain, the grid can coordinate energy savings across communities without revealing sensitive private routines.
This technology is targeted at smart grid operators, energy management system developers, and prosumer microgrid communities seeking decentralised demand response solutions. The work represents early-stage, simulated research evaluated on test systems with varying participant numbers. Commercial deployment would require moving beyond simulated models to field testing on operational smart meters, integration with existing utility billing infrastructure, and evaluation of real-world network latency.
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With the development of distributed and renewable energy resources and smart grids, energy management systems that allow electricity prosumers to schedule their power usage, are seen as a prominent solution for reducing electricity costs. This paper presents a novel blockchain-based mechanism to incentivize prosumers to save energy, while preserving their privacy. In the proposed mechanism, each prosumer utilizes an energy management system that is based on the percentage power change (PPC) at each hour of the day. The use of PPC values allows the proposed blockchain to preserve the privacy of the prosumers as no sensitive information is shared. The calculated PPC values are shared among the prosumers. The prosumer with the minimum PPC value is selected as the validator of the blockchain, which is responsible for creating the next block of the blockchain. The problem of approving the validator, by other prosumers, is formulated using a novel zero-metric weighted average consensus. The communication model required to reach this consensus is investigated and the consensus value is analytically derived. Multiple test systems with varying number of prosumers are simulated and analyzed. The results demonstrate the capability of the proposed mechanism to sustain energy while preserving privacy in a scalable manner.
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DOI: 10.1109/tste.2021.3109482
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