Blockchain as Key Enabling Technology for Future Electric Energy Exchange: A Vision

Our energy scenario is nowadays shaped by progressive electrification of energy final use. In this context, electricity networks are seeing a growing multitude of distributed assets entering from the edges of the grid and acquiring new ICT capabilities that were limited before to a restricted number of major players. Particularly, assets like Photovoltaic Inverter (PvI), Electric Vehicle (EV) chargers, wind turbines controllers, programmable loads, storage systems, and other Distributed Energy Resources (DER) are now able to communicate through different technologies and make conscious choices under human-decisions or even independently. This is leading to a decentralization of the system's view by increasing single actor independence. Notwithstanding, a problem arises when current centrally-managed electricity networks struggle to coordinate massive amounts of new figures and adapt to this new decentralized paradigm. Therefore, a decentralized coordination-and-control framework will ensure better integration of s and new figures as prosumers, while allowing higher exploitation of their potential compared to centrally managed systems. This article seeks in Blockchains the enabling technology for designing and supporting such a grid infrastructure. It develops a first framework to address this need by envisioning a grid-system based on the direct participation of nowadays-used embedded-energy-devices within a decentralized platform hosting specific coordination procedures. The platform was developed in an experimental research campaign performed at ABB Laboratories basing on embedded-devices currently designed as control-connectivity boards for smart-inverters. Therefore this article introduces the background theory and reasons behind this proposed system. The intent here is not to give all the specific details of the implementation, but introduce the supporting reason, high-level design, and required characteristic of the Blockchain-based platform for coordinating grid operations. Blockchain technology is seen here as the appropriate technology to enable the realization of a multi-actor energy-management system and enable distributed coordination in power grids.