Balancing Usage Profiles and Benefitting End Users through Blockchain Based Local Energy Trading: A German Case Study

Abstract

The electricity market has increasingly played a significant role in ensuring the smooth operation of the power grid. The latest incarnation of the electricity market follows a bottom-up paradigm, rather than a top-down one, and aims to provide flexibility services to the power grid. The blockchain-based local energy market (LEM) is one such bottom-up market paradigm. It essentially enables consumers and prosumers (those who can generate power locally) within a defined power network topology to trade renewable energy amongst each other in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion using blockchain technology. This paper presents the development of such a P2P trading-facilitated LEM and the analysis of the proposed blockchain-based LEM by means of a case study using actual German residential customer data. The performance of the proposed LEM is also compared with that of BAU, in which power is traded via time-of-use (ToU) and feed-in-tariff (FiT) rates. The comparative results demonstrate: (1) the participants’ bill savings; (2) mitigation of the power grid’s export and import; (3) no/minimal variations in the margins of energy suppliers and system operators; and (4) cost comparison of Ethereum versus Polygon blockchain, thus emphasising the domineering performance of the developed P2P trading-based LEM mechanism.

Keywords

• local energy market
• peer-to-peer
• blockchain
• power grid
• energy supplier
• system operator