Novel information and data exchange within power systems using enhanced blockchain technologies

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonCurrent energy systems are primarily designed for centralized power generation and supplying bulk electricity to users with stable and predictable usage patterns. However, with the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources (RES), future energy systems will require greater flexibility and wider distribution of both demand and supply. Integrating RES on a large scale poses challenges to the hosting capacity of distribution systems. To address these challenges, the digitalization of energy systems through novel Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure is essential. The shift from centralized to highly distributed systems necessitates increased coordination and communication efforts. This is because a distributed system is composed of multiple independent entities that need to communicate and collaborate effectively to accomplish a shared objective. Coordination and communication are necessary to ensure that the system is operating efficiently and effectively. Traditional centralized cloud-based data exchange schemes depend on a single trusted third party, this may lead to single-point failure and lack of data privacy and access control. To overcome these issues, a novel approach is proposed for exchanging data within power systems using blockchain technology. This approach enables users to securely exchange data while maintaining ownership. The experiments conducted demonstrate that the proposed approach can handle more users and enables information and data exchange within power systems. Secondly, this thesis proposes an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based prediction model to optimize the performance of the blockchain-enabled data exchange approach. A use case for exchanging data within the power system is implemented on the proposed platform using various performance metrics. The results of the proposed approach are compared to two other schemes: the baseline scheme and an optimized scheme. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed approach can enhance network performance when compared to the baseline and optimized schemes. In summary, the proposed novel approach to ICT infrastructure for successfully exchanging information and data within power systems entities. The performance of the novel approach is evaluated based on the ability to handle multiple users, scalability, reliability, and security