A Blockchain-based Approach for Optimal Energy Dispatch and Fault Reporting in P2P Microgrid

Proper utilization of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) in a microgrid can make a smart city locality self-sufficient in power generation and consumption, reducing loads on the main grid. The concept of a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) microgrid aims to provide efficient energy dispatch with minimal power loss and higher incentives to the prosumers. However, the P2P-based architecture comes with transmission management and maintenance challenges, resulting from an absence of a global view of transmissions in the grid. Being decentralized in nature identification of critical issues such as congestion, energy theft, and other faults is challenging and such issues may result in power outages in the grid. In, this work we propose a blockchain-based approach for optimal energy dispatch and fault reporting in a P2P microgrid. We harness the capabilities of the blockchain for its application as an information exchange platform addressing the above-mentioned issues and demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach with proper experiments. Our experiments show low power consumption while maintaining the proposed approach.