Deployment and analysis of a blockchain-based local energy market

Abstract

The adoption of blockchain technology is emerging as a promising approach in managing decentralized local energy markets (LEM). In this study we analyze the issues related to the deployment of a blockchain-based LEM on devices as much as possible similar to modern smart meters. The presented LEM is based on an automated market-making mechanism. Buying and selling prices are dynamically determined by the amount of energy consumed and produced within a local energy community. We implemented the market in a blockchain application based on the Cosmos framework, which was deployed on embedded devices in a test pilot consisting of 18 residential buildings in Southern Switzerland. The sustainability of the application was investigated by analyzing the resources required by the blockchain to operate. The obtained results show how the developed application uses a small part of the resources of the embedded devices, approximately 100 MB for the memory usage and about 4% as regards the CPU. Thus, while the application deployment on smart meters is still troublesome, especially for memory requirements, the deployment at the data concentrator level is reasonable and feasible. Finally, we propose possible improvements and extensions that can be implemented in future versions of the presented solution.