Energy Trading Between Prosumers Based on Blockchain Technology

Electrification of the energy systems and the current policies for sustainable development are increasing the potential for distributed energy resources (DERs). Within this trend, electricity grid generation and intermediary elements (e.g. batteries) are distributed, promoting a new business model where the consumers have become prosumers. That is to say, they can both generate and consume energy. The distributed energy generation is based on renewable (mainly, photovoltaics) and storage (i.e. batteries). However, the produced energy is unpredictable without forecasting tools and intermittent (i.e. dependent on the solar resources). Additionally, although the priority is the usage of this energy for self-consumption, the surplus of energy is usually sold to the DSO (Distribution System Operator). Then, the usage of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading fosters new business models and novel paradigms of energy system generation where people can generate their own energy and share it locally with each other. The aforementioned factors have encouraged a wider adoption of microgrids powered by renewable distributed energy sources and they provide a lot of economic and environmental benefits. For that end, this paper presents a P2P approach, combined with demand and production forecasting, to enable novel prosumers' business models and promoting renewable energy communities for energy transition.