The PEBBLES project – enabling blockchain based transactive energy trading of energy & flexibility within a regional market

Abstract

The power industry is facing a transition towards a smart grid, mainly driven by the expansion of renewable power generation, which will increasingly penetrate the grid as highly intermittent distributed energy resources (DER). The way how power markets and grids are operated today, is not suited to facilitate this transition efficiently beyond a certain penetration level. Flexibility of distributed assets is not used as it could be and grid congestions are causing either increasing redispatch or curtailment costs or costs for grid extensions. Therefore a new paradigm of smart distribution grids and smart decentralized markets is required. In order to address these challenges and trends and to figure out if and how the upcoming blockchain technology can facilitate this in a better way than traditional, central ledger based technologies, a consortium of a German DSO, companies and research institutes have bundled their forces. The consortium started a joint research project called PEBBLES with the aim to build a demonstrator of a blockchain based trading platform for trading of energy and flexibility on a regional level. This paper describes the general approach of a new market concept, the general architecture and functionalities of the demonstrator, the use cases which will be enabled by the demonstrator platform, the anticipated advantages of such a system in order to create additional incentives for DER operators and consumers, to increase the overall system efficiency and to maximize the utilization of distribution grids. Finally the paper will describe the anticipated overall effect on accelerating energy transition.