Projects RP3033 and RP3043 have seen the establishment of living labs at White Gum Valley (WGV) and the smart cities and suburbs grant has enabled the world’s first development featuring peer-to-peer (P2P) trading of renewable energy across the grid and shared alternative water systems (also featuring P2P trading). RP3043 is an upscaled project of RP3033, in terms of the spatial scale and the number of participants involved.
Blockchain technology and P2P trading have been widely discussed across climate change policy community and been applied in many different climate-related sectors, from climate investment to carbon pricing. With the falling price of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, the number of households with PV is increasing, thereby P2P energy trading becomes the most promising applications that can be supported by Blockchain. The transition from project RP3033 to RP3043 experienced an upscaling process of P2P energy trading in City of Fremantle. RP3043 project in particular has investigated on how to efficiently implement Blockchain technology for P2P energy trading including the upsides and downsides of the technology. However the evaluation of its environmental impact has not been considered. The cost and benefits of Blockchain system and its environmental impact are the important research issues.
Western Australia, as the first government allowing P2P trading, is currently collecting high level measurements and (IoT, AWS) data and the first example of P2P trading of energy across the grid, globally. However, although an optimistic view on the energy saving from P2P trading exists, little is known about the cost-benefit of carbon emission from the upscaling of P2P trading between total energy saved from grid and the energy consumed by the computation to support Blockchain operation. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse the cost-benefit of carbon emission from the upscaling of P2P energy trading.
The CRCLCL’s contribution:
This utilisation project will enhance City of Fremantle’s knowledge on social and environmental impact of upscaling P2P energy trading by providing for the quantitative analysis evidence from smart energy data from the WGV and the beyond WGV projects. CRCLCL funding will be used for the researcher (Dr Xin Liu) to analyse the variation of energy saving under different scales, and to conduct the cost-benefit analysis. Dr Xin Liu is a spatial scientist and is currently working on the large data from the WGV monitoring infrastructure to test P2P trading of energy and water. In the proposed project, the spatial characteristics, e.g. spatial upscaling, of the energy and water data will be analysed using filtered data from meters in WGV and across Fremantle. The data will be sourced into an AWS (Amazon Web Service) server and delivered into an API (Application Programming Interface) from where the de-identified data can be sent to the researchers and approved stakeholders. These data will also be analysed by another CRCLCL funded researcher (Dr Ponnie Clark) from a view of Blockchain operation perspective. Dr Ponnie Clark is a computational scientist and is current working on the improvement of Blockchain efficiency for P2P energy trading. In the proposed project, the total energy consumed by the computation to support Blockchain operation will be calculated based on the large data from the WGV monitoring infrastructure.
Program
Project leader
Prof Greg Morrison, Curtin University
Project status
Complete
Project period
09/2018
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CRCLCL Project Reports
RP3033u3: The Costs and Benefits of Blockchain Based Peer-to-peer Energy Trading: An Evaluation from the Perspective of Carbon Emission and Economic Value
Australia has over 2 million PV installations given a combined capacity of over 11.1 gigawatts as of January 2019 (2019). This area experienced extremely rapid growth between 2010 and 2013 and has continued to grow. As Australia’s high capacity of PV installations, distributed energy markets have been established to capitalise on the available energy. Several markets are being trialled around the world including Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading, business-to-business energy trading, wholesale and retail energy, energy commodity trading, and others. The most common market is P2P trading which allows households to trade electricity.
Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology that can be used to securely store digital transactions. Blockchain has demonstrated great uptake potential in P2P energy trading with a growing number of start-up companies, pilots, trials, and research projects adopting the technology within their business model. The revolution of blockchain encourages innovation and enables a low-carbon transition and sustainability (Juri, Timo et al. 2016). According to Deloitte (Grewal-Carr V and S. 2016) and PWC (Hasse, Perfall et al. 2016) reports, blockchain has the potential to disrupt the energy sector using energy commodities as digital assets to be traded.
However, concerns over the energy use, the carbon footprint, and the cost of blockchain have recently generated debate. The carbon footprint and cost of blockchain are derived from its validation process which requires specialised hardware with computing power and vast amounts of electricity. Public perceptions on the impact this technology has on the environment and its associate costs have also garnered recent negative publicity. This reduces the perception of the benefits of blockchain technology. To investigate the impact of blockchain, we compare the energy consumed to support blockchain with the total energy saved from the electrical grid from deployment of blockchain-based P2P energy trading.
The aim of this study is to evaluate the cost and benefit of blockchain-based P2P energy trading. The energy consumed and carbons emitted from the blockchain validation process are quantified. The cost of blockchain technology is calculated as well to determine its economic value. This report also provides various insights into the transformation of P2P energy trading using different blockchain scalability solutions. Real data from operating P2P energy trading systems is used in this report
Partners on this project
- Curtin University of Technology