Optimizing Microgrid Resilience: Integrating IoT, Blockchain, and Smart Contracts for Power Outage Management

Abstract

Power outages can severely affect individuals, businesses, and communities, leading to disruptions, economic losses, and safety risks. The existing power recovery strategies often fail to adequately address the challenges associated with such outages. These challenges encompass a range of complexities, including resource allocation disparities, efficient prosumer integration, energy demand variability, and isolated generators. This paper presents a microgrid-centric power recovery strategy that leverages IoT, blockchain, smart contracts, and optimisation techniques for peer-to-peer energy sharing within the microgrid. The proposed strategy comprehensively addresses the challenges associated with the existing power recovery strategies. The paper outlines the system architecture for IoT and blockchain-enabled microgrids, discusses the mathematical modelling for energy sharing, and explores cost-optimal power restoration strategies. An incentive mechanism motivates prosumers to support restoration strategies during outages. Furthermore, the paper describes a blockchain smart contract facilitating peer-to-peer energy exchange in regions affected by power outages. This approach can mitigate the disruptive impact of power outages by providing reliable and community-centric power recovery solutions. Through validation with real-world data from our university's distribution grid test bed, Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) analysis and performance evaluations using the Hyperledger Caliper benchmark tool, this paper demonstrates its feasibility and effectiveness, paving the way for enhanced power recovery strategies and increased resilience in the face of energy disruptions.