Blockchain Smart Contracts for Transactive Energy Systems

Abstract

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This report demonstrates the impact of blockchain technology underlying a transactive energy system and articulates details and principle components of each of five stages in a transactive energy system. This report depicts the engineering requirements of a sample market system, blockchain features, and the relationship between those requirements and features (Section 2.2). Clear value propositions of blockchain features for transactive energy systems are: identity management, security of data, resiliency, decentralization and smart contract trustworthiness, performance, integrity in a trustless environment and access control. Due to the immutability afforded by blockchain architecture, increased data fidelity could potentially help detect targeted cyber-attacks and increase resiliency of grid integration. A distributed system can be more fault tolerant and enable transactive energy by supporting machine-to-machine transactions that can be integrated directly into complex grid operations without the need of trust in a third party. Energy auctions, and potentially registration processes, can be carried out according to transparent rules implemented as smart contracts (Section 4.0). In this current experiment, we ran a use-case/table-top exercise that imitated a real-time 5-min double auction market. The objective of this demonstration is to investigate the applicability of blockchain with transactive energy systems (Section 3.0).