DAISEE - Buiding the Internets of Energy

At this point, we have initialized the first 2 parts of the prototype:
- Monitoring of energy, using in-line current sensors (in replacement of non-invasive CitizenWatt sensors) and the CitizenWatt application. The sensors replacement allows to measure low currents more accurately. See intructions n°4 .
- Configuration of a local blockchain and deployment of new versions of smart-contracts. We introduced the notion of token to exchange energy between peers. See intructions 1 to 3.

The next step was to have these two parts communicate in order to:
- store the energy data on the blockchain,
- trigger automated exchanges according to predefined rules.

For now the rules are quite simple. Since the energy sources are batteries, the energy exchange is triggered when the battery of the consumer node (node 1) falls below a certain threshold. A Python script will read the data from CitizenWatt application, update the data on the Blockchain and activate the relay to switch to the power source of node 2 (producer).

The part is detailed in the instruction 5.

Using in-line current sensors improves the metering.
And blockchain setup changes allow to speed up transactions validation on single board computers with limited resources like Raspberry Pi (use of Proof-of-Authority instead of Proof-of-Work).

However, there are still improvements to be made, especially on :
- the python script to handle the triggering of the relay in the different possible cases,
- the smart-contracts, to simplify the process (for example: the tokens management).

The issue of data storage and access remains to be addressed (privacy, security...).

Then, the next step will be to be more closer the actual conditions (no direct echanges between 2 peers, but connection to a local grid with more peers), in order to prepare the field experiments.

After a first version of our prototype that allowed us to learn about the Blockchain technologies (see prototype v0.1 in 2016 entry), we started the year 2017 on a new iteration of the prototype.
The objectives are to better understand the technology and its limitations, evaluate its relevance to different use-cases and to prepare the future field experimentations.

The main goal of the prototype is to allow peer-to-peer energy exchanges between several nodes of a small-scale network by:

• Collecting and monitoring the Energy consumption/production of the different nodes,
• Triggering Energy exchange according to the predefined rules.

For this new version, we still rely on open-source CitizenWatt Application to display energy data and a local Ethereum blockchain for exchanges traceability (see the first intructions).
The focus will be on current measurement, data management and rules governing energy exchanges.