Distributed Co-operative Demand Side Management for Energy Communities

This paper presents a method to implement cooperative Demand Side Management (DSM) approaches over a distributed communication network. Our method combines a decentralized DSM approach called Profile Steering with two distributed consensus mechanisms Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). We make use of a network manager to moderate the network and a distributed ledger system to store the power profiles from each planning period.We evaluate our approach using publicly-available real data from 25 houses. We successfully implemented our distributed approach in Python using JSON files as blocks and performed time-performance evaluations of this implementation. We show that, distributed DSM for day-ahead planning using blockchain concepts is possible and adds an overhead of only 0.98 seconds and 3.99 seconds in the case of PoW and PoS respectively.