Print Email Facebook Twitter Towards Decentralized Grids Title Towards Decentralized Grids: EnergyBazaar: decentralized free-market energy-trade within an isolated community micro-grid Author van den Biggelaar, Dirk (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering) Contributor Erkin, Zekeriya (mentor) Mazo Espinosa, Manuel (mentor) Hijgenaar, Sjors (mentor) Degree granting institution Delft University of Technology Date 2018-04-20 Abstract We witness the rise of prosumers: consumers that produce a surplus of energy that can be sup- plied back into the grid. However, for energy-trade between prosumers and consumers, a cen- tralized and undesirable middle-man is still necessary. We developed a method to decentralize essential aspects of energy distribution between households. Macro-grids are divided into vari- ous neighborhood sized community-grids; a micro-grid. A micro-grid as a community yields a degree of self-sustainability. Nevertheless, micro-grids currently still possess centralized elements. The presence of central controllers, trading-agents or banks, maintains this undesirable situation. Decentralization of a power-grid increases end-user autonomy, independency and fairness in the system.We propose to establish a truly transactive micro-grid: decentralized in its energy distribution, control and money-flow by deploying EnergyBazaar, a distributed trading algorithm. Concepts of game theory are used in the design to enable EnergyBazaar to solve the economic dispatch problem: agents want to individually optimize their social welfare, while the collective task is to stabilize the grid. Micro-grids make use of a decoupled hierarchical structure: primary control is responsible for fast dynamics of voltage and frequency, secondary control coordinates the economics within the micro-grid. In its core, EnergyBazaar coordinates inverter-based droop parameters within the Energy Storage System (ESS) of each agent, managing their charging/discharging behaviour. A trade-off is identified between economical gain and the necessity of surviving energy scarcity. For this, energy patterns are predicted and acted upon. In contrast to a coordinator dictating a centralized solution, EnergyBazaar creates a free market, where agents individually converge to a global Nash equilibrium. A comparison is made to show performance of both.By rejecting centralized institutions in the micro-grid, trust challenges are introduced: achieving decentralized money-flows, the necessity of shared information during distributed optimization and the manipulation of the free-market by malicious agents. We introduce an approach of mitigating these issues in a decentralized paradigm by embedding EnergyBazaar in a smart-contract deployed on a blockchain platform. Subject Decentralised Micro-GridGame-TheoryBlockchainDistributed Optimization To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9b1f7b2f-fec8-4993-bcf7-37ab301c0d02 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights © 2018 Dirk van den Biggelaar Files PDF Towards_Decentralized_Mic ... gelaar.pdf 14.1 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:9b1f7b2f-fec8-4993-bcf7-37ab301c0d02/datastream/OBJ/view