Using a Ledger to Facilitate Autonomous Peer-to-Peer Virtual Net Metering of Solar Pho-Tovoltaic Distributed Generation
33 Pages Posted: 29 Feb 2024
Abstract
To assist electric utilities to overcome limitations of centralized billing and encourage distributed production of solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity, this study designs and tests a novel open-source autonomous virtual utility to monitor users and enable peer-to-peer trading. This study provides system design and software implementation of the concept using blockchain technolo-gy written in Solidity and Truffle. A set of smart contracts adds users to a system and monitors their demand, PV generation, and facilitates transactions between users on an hourly basis when one user has PV-generated excess electricity, and another has demand. Unit tests for each of the contracts’ methods are written in Solidity, and data on gas usage and costs is collected. Once the contracts have been written and tested, a JavaScript simulation is developed to use the con-tracts on real load and PV generation data for one year on an hourly basis. Two case studies are quantified: 1) true peers, where all houses are prosumers with rooftop PV, and 2) intermittent transition case, where PV deployment and demand are more varied. The results found that with 10 users in the system, the true peers case study resulted in an uneconomic number of exchanges, but the intermittent transition case study resulted in more than a factor of twenty increases in exchanges and net cost savings. The savings more than doubles for both cases when time of use pricing is in effect. The system utility increases with more variability of PV production across participating users and is recommended for utilities targeting increases in distributed generation during the energy transition.
Keywords: Solar energy, Photovoltaic, ledger, Peer-to-peer trading, Distributed generation, prosumer
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