BENTRADE

As technological advancements come to life, new smart energy delivering services become available such as rooftop solar panels, wind tribunes, and storage devices. Triggered by new technologies, policy, regulation, and customer expectations are all contributing to a shifting paradigm such that traditional electricity utility businesses can no longer only rely on demand for the kWh commodity. Demand for electricity grows and become distributed, and centralized grid is too costly and sluggish for this need. It is getting harder and more costly to predict and balance demand and supply while lacking visibility into millions of new consumer devices and distributed energy resources popping up at the grid edge. In near future utilities will have to serve many more customers, therefore, new expectations for local or green smart energy products, convenience or resiliency will arise. At this point, BENTRADE aims to provide platform and smart services to:

• Decrease dependence on commodity electricity and disseminate use of RES – Renewable Energy Sources
• Create distributed energy asset owners
• Balance demand and response at the grid level
• Reduce risks of failure and cyber-attacks by distributed model

The solution offered is to design a micro-grid with renewable energy sources and create a distributed ledger system that functions across grid-connected devices, with several financial alternatives for transactive energy, and a foundation that advances market design and technology in tandem. These distributed ledgers will store, in a tamper proof manner, the energy presumption (production & consumption) data collected from IOT devices, while self-enforcing smart contracts programmatically define the expected energy flexibility at the level of each prosumer; therefore, outline the rules for balancing the energy demand with the energy production at grid level.

The expected impact is to help overcome some of the key challenges in the energy sector—most notably intermittency, aging grids, balancing distribution-connected generation, managing consumer self-generation, and coping with increasing system complexity.

Project website.