Today, the blockchain is synonymous of technological innovation, being recognised among the 10 top strategy technologies in 2018 by the consulting company Gartner, it is more and more adopted in different sectors. However, the initial enthusiasm around this technology is going beyond the peak of inflated expectations, towards more stable applications in money transactions, cryptocurrencies and Digital Commodity Exchanges. Essentially, misguided efforts, the overuse of blockchain, and the Bitcoin's price drop have been the main reasons for this decay in expectations. Nevertheless, the exploitation of the blockchain technology in the power systems area appears largely underexplored, furthermore, the relation to the physical asset makes the blockchain application more complex but also more reliable and related to measurable benefits. The most common applications in the power systems area relate to the energy market. When the blockchain technology is indeed applied to the energy field, the term energy blockchain is used. This article aims to propose a wide perspective about the application of the blockchain technology in the power systems area, clarifying some technical aspects concerning this promising technology, the features and applications developed so far, while focusing on the future of innovative applications in the electrical energy sector.

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The use of Distributed Ledger Technologies such as Blockchain for certifying Demand Response services allows for the creation of a distributed system in which customers can communicate with the system operator to provide their flexibility, in a secure, transparent and traceable way. Blockchain technology also supports incentive mechanisms for users taking part in the service through the generation of utility tokens to recognize the user's contribution. This paper presents the experimental test of a novel methodology for Demand Response programs implementation by using the Blockchain technology. The latter is employed for defining a distributed Demand Response service and a new system for its tracing and certification. For this work, a Smart Contract has been conceived and written to execute Demand Response events, calculate users' baseline, compute the support provided by each user towards the fulfilment of the requested load curve modification and remunerate each user with utility tokens proportionally to their contribution. To test the methodology, a Hyperledger Fabric network and a Smart Contract were deployed on four nodes of the Microgrid Laboratory of the Department of Energy Technology at Aalborg University (DK). Subsequently, a realistic scenario comprising two consumer nodes was developed using power electronic converters for generating the household profiles and Smart Meters for the measurement of the consumption profiles. Theoretical and experimental results show the feasibility of Distributed Ledger Technologies in smart grids management with a minimum investment in new hardware while enabling the active participation of customers in Demand Response more transparently and fairly.

This paper describes the possibility to use the blockchain technology for load and generation aggregation in a new distributed Demand Response (DR) service and customers remuneration system. The blockchain technology and the use of smart contracts for DR allow the creation of a distributed system in which customers can communicate directly, in a transparent, secure and traceable way, with the grid operator to provide their flexibility. In this paper, the DR problem formulation takes into account several aspects, which are periodically executed. First, the blockchain records customers' energy consumption or production, then, the smart contract starts calculating the baseline and the potential support provided by each customer to fulfill the requested load adaptation. Customers' availability for generation and load profile modulation is also taken into account, as well as their privacy and an updated definition of the roles of grid and market operators in a new Demand-Response scenario supported by the blockchain technology. The blockchain used is Hyperledger Fabric, since it turned to be flexible for smart contracts implementation while supporting multi-tenancy. Results show the possibility to successfully apply the blockchain technology to this particular topic, even considering privacypreserving issues.