Lebanon’s Transactive Energy Blockchain Prototype

This project is developing a Transactive Energy (TE) blockchain prototype for the Lebanon Community Power (LCP) Initiative to enhance the sustainability and resilience of the Lebanon City electric grid.  TE and blockchain technologies sit at the forefront of electric grid innovation.  When integrated together, these two technologies would empower LCP participants to transact local carbon-free electricity.  This prototype is novel in three respects.  First, TE control algorithms based upon distributed multi-agent system optimization have only recently begun to provide convergence guarantees in the power systems engineering literature.  Second, to our knowledge, there exist only two reported cases where blockchain has been successfully applied to electricity applications.  Third, and most importantly, while the above instances have demonstrated algorithmic convergence, they have yet to provide any technical guarantees of reliability.  Building upon our extensive theoretical research on renewable energy integration, and its practical application in full-scale studies such as the ISO New England (ISO-NE) System Operational Analysis Renewable Energy integration Study (SOARES) and the Abu Dhabi Electric Vehicle Integration Study (ADEVIS), we will be able to make, for the first time, simultaneous guarantees of technical reliability and economic optimality.  Furthermore, the integration of blockchain will dramatically enhance the cyber-security of the implementation.