Cooperative energy management of a community of smart-buildings: A Blockchain approach

Demand Response (DR) is progressively moving from a centralized, unidirectional structure to a set of advanced decentralized mechanisms that better balance distributed supply and demand. This paper presents a decentralized cooperative DR framework to manage the daily energy exchanges within a community of Smart-Buildings, in the presence of local Renewable Energy Sources (RES). The proposed algorithm taps into the flexibility of the participants to let them decide of a day-ahead community power profile, and subsequently ensures the forecast tracking during the next day. In practice, the algorithm is fully decentralized by the Blockchain technology, that enables a trusted communication medium among the participants and enforces autonomous monitoring and billing via Smart-Contracts. With such an energy management framework, participating Smart-Buildings can together aim at a common objective, such as carbon-free resources usage or aggregated grid services, without depending on a centralized aggregator/utility. Simulations on realistic Swiss building models demonstrate that nearly all the renewable production resources could be harnessed locally through the presented framework, compared to selfish individual optimization. Under a quadratic cost of grid electricity, the considered community profile could dramatically be flattened, hence avoiding costly peaks at the grid interface. A scalability analysis shows that, considering the current public Ethereum Blockchain, the framework could handle a community size of up to 100 Smart-Buildings.