2020 PES GM 8/5 Panel Video: Addressing Power System Operation Challenges Using Blockchain

Today, competitive electricity market is being more widely adopted around the world, and more innovative technologies and distributed generators are being integrated into the grid. This transform brings about more diverse ownerships of power system assets and peer-to-peer energy transaction opportunities, and adds more cyber components into the grid, causing new challenges for decision makers and system operators, and raise the issue of cyber security in power systems. Blockchain is also known as distributed ledger technology, which enables the market to operate without a centralized party while ensuring fair play of all participating parties using properly designed incentives. A consensus can be made among all participating parties, while the data is encrypted and stored on a distributed basis, making the system more robust against cyber-attacks. Meanwhile, blockchain can also be adopted as a secure measure for asset ownership tracking. Because of the advantages of the blockchain technology, it is attracting an increasing interest in the power community. A number of demonstration projects on automating energy transactions using blockchain have been implemented around the world, IEEE standards on blockchain applications in energy systems are being developed, and there is an ongoing academic discussion on its feasibility. It is essential to create an opportunity for engineers and researchers in the power community to communicate the state-of-the-art of this technology.