As the power system is undergoing fundamental changes in the scope of the energy transition, the existing regulatory structure lacks the necessary components to cope with these changes. More decentralized energy resources are being integrated into the system on lower voltage levels, while coordination of these, especially considering the limited grid capacities, is not realized. Furthermore, central power exchanges operate without considering these physical capacities within one bidding zone and limit small-scale participants. A restructured energy market is required to enable small-scale asset integration and the recognition of physical limitations. Therefore, this paper presents a decentralized, grid-aware peer-to-peer market model that allows for automatically executed, local schedule procurement of peers within a distribution system community. The model uses nodal trading agents and a sensitivity-based approximation to assess the dynamic grid fees of any transaction, hence mapping the physical limitations to the consumers' energy prices. Therefore, users can fully adjust their behavior based on the demand and availability of energy and the grid capacities, which the energy prices comprise. Based on these, each peer is enabled to adjust its behavior through load shifting, storage optimization, and various other adaptions. Overall the proposed market structure transforms the power system from a correcting to a coordinating nature.

Transactive Energy Systems (TES) represent a new approach to achieve an optimal utilisation of distributed energy resources (DER) as well as realising a better integration of prosumers. As transactive participants, producers, consumers and prosumers take part in achieving a dynamic and efficient grid operation based on economic and control mechanisms. A key challenge of realising TES is to enable a decentralised structure. With the gaining popularity of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and especially Blockchain in the year 2017, this trend has also gained traction in the field of TES to build a decentralised system. However, even before the aforementioned DLT approaches from 2017 onwards, there have been functioning TES implementations that are not based on DLT. It is also important to note that with all the advantages that the use of DLT brings, there are also new challenges linked with. The objective of this paper is to analyse, whether the use of DLT for TES is scientifically plausible or can be identified as a temporal hype. At first, the foundations of TES as well as the basic principles of using DLT for TES are being presented. Furthermore, different implementations of TES with and without the use of DLT are being shown. On this basis a comparative analysis of regular TES as well as TES based on DLT is executed. Within this framework an assessment of the effectiveness of using DLT for TES is formed.

As power systems continuously become increasingly volatile and complex systems, conventional market designs turn inefficient, unnecessarily exclusive, and also agnostic towards grid and system capacities. While partial solutions to this already exist, the emerging distributed ledger technologies open up the field to holistic solutions. This work outlines the shortcomings of nowadays market designs, provides a conceptual design improvement along with its technical requirements and finally presents a high-level implementation based on IBM’s blockchain project Hyperledger Fabric.

With an increasing percentage of single-phase distributed energy resources and modern single-phase loads in the low voltage network, challenges are increasing for voltage grid operators. Especially the power quality in rural areas with long power cables is at risk. Voltage regulators such as on-load tap changers (OLTCs) or line-voltage regulators (LVRs) provide a feasible option for grid reinforcements. The focus of this paper is on the capability of the LVR to mitigate voltage unbalances and on a corresponding novel four step evaluation concept. Therefore, the necessary simulation environment, including load and generation models, is established. To evaluate the capability of the LVR, also the performance of an OLTC and a Zic-Zac-Loadbalancer are analysed. With three static worst case Scenarios the novel evaluation concept is applied. The simulations show an improved single-phase power integration with the LVR and OLTC regarding voltage unbalances.