Blockchain Implementation for DER Visibility and Transaction Verification in Wholesale Market

Distributed Energy Resources (DER), due to their high ramp rates, can bring about high flexibility and reliability to the power grid. A proper option to harness DER capabilities is their aggregation to offer ancillary service products (ASP) in the wholesale market. This option is backed by FERC Order 2222 requiring planning of the ISOs across the United States for participation of DER aggregators in the ASP markets. However, the DERs are spread across distribution grids which impedes tracking their ASP delivery. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework to bring about the visibility of DERs to ISOs by secure recording and verification of the monetary, energy and ASP transactions made among the ISO, aggregator and DERs. Our major focus is on a type of DER named distributed prosumer (DP) which is comprised of rooftop solar generation, battery storage, electric vehicle charger and controllable electric loads. We conducted a case study where the simulation results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the framework in making DERs visible and tractable to the ISO.