Decentralized Autonomous Control of Smart Grid with Blockchain Algorithms

The upcoming revolution in electricity distribution will change the way in which electricity will be delivered to end-users. In particular, these advancements will make end-users capable to managing and controlling the local energy production/consumption through local energy markets and peer to peer initiatives. In this scenario, this paper wants to propose a Decentralized Genetic Algorithm (DGA) able to perform market and grid optimizations in a fully autonomous and distributed fashion. The proposed DGA is specifically designed for being performed by IoT devices, such as smart meters and intelligent controllers, spread through the power network. Coordination among them is obtained by the presence of a Decentralized Master Ledger (DML) running on a blockchain, which serves as a common, immutable, trustless and cyber-attack safe memory for the process. In particular, the DGA has been used for performing automated scheduling of a LV smart distribution network through a grid constraint aware local energy market. The DGA platform has been tested with a Hardware in the Loop experimental setup implemented on a RTDS Novacor device as network simulator, and Raspberry Pi Zeroes as DGA computing devices. The defined setup has allowed to achieve decentralized and automated scheduling of distributed resources in the network with a fine-grained time step of one minute.