Consumers and communities will be empowered to actively participate in the electricity market and generate their own electricity, consume it or sell it back to the market while taking into account the costs and benefits for the system as a whole — European Commission
Our vision is to provide everyone with the possibility to create and manage electrical energy communities on the Ethereum blockchain, creating a world of shared energy for a brighter future. For prosumers participating to the energy communities, Hive Power will lower the energy tariffs and reduce the payback time of renewable energy sources. It will allow selling flexibility as a service to system operators, to help them balancing the grid.
The challenge:
The power sector is facing a paradigm change, moving from a centralized structure with big power plants (hydro, coal, gas and nuclear) to a decentralized scenario of distributed energy resources (DER), such as solar and wind. Within this framework, a new actor is emerging, the prosumer, i.e. households or organizations which at times produce surplus energy and feed it into a distribution network; whilst at other times (when their energy requirements outstrip their own production) they consume energy from that grid. The transition to a prosumer-driven electrical grid can be quite bumpy.
The lack of centralized planning and the increase of intermittent electricity production in the lower levels of the grid due to the penetration of solar generation raise the stress on the electrical distribution grid. This can lead to severe power quality problems, especially voltage violations and line congestions, with which the distribution system operators (DSOs) need to cope. These problems are intensified by the increase of electricity consumption due to electrical heat pumps and electric vehicles, which further increase power oscillations within the distribution grid.
What needs to change:
To overcome this problem significant investments in the grid infrastructure are expected. This could trigger a so called business “death spiral”, or “grid defection” [2, 3] because prosumers reduce their regular energy consumption from the central grid in favor of energy they produce themselves. In addition, they can install batteries to further increase their energy independence. Most likely, these customers will still depend on the central grid for emergency or peak power use, so electric utility companies will have to operate their costly infrastructure and power-generating.
Our solution:
In this paper we present the Hive Power platform, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The goal of Hive Power is to create energy sharing communities where all participants are guaranteed to benefit from their participation, and at the same time achieve a technical and financial optimum for the entire community. This is achieved by devising a (mathematically sound) market mechanism that incentivizes the participants to collaborate with each other by coordinating their energy production and consumption.
In contrast to other energy exchange market schemes, the Hive Power platform takes also into account technical aspects, such as cables, power rating, and voltage limits in order to provide an optimal solution that achieves multiple objectives. Hive Power is perfectly designed for the current grid configuration, enabling the electrical grid to operate safely and cost-effectively by ensuring a fair and resilient energy market for all actors involved.
Hive Power Platform
Concept:
Hive Power develops a turnkey solution for the creation and management of local energy communities on the blockchain, called Hives. A Hive is a distributed energy market platform regulated through smart contracts where every prosumer can buy and sell electrical energy. Like in the real world, a Hive is composed by a set of Workers, who provide for the livelihood of the “colony”, and a Queen, who rules and coordinates them (.The Workers consist of blockchain-enabled smart meters, which allow their users to participate in the local market and interact with it through an User App. Each Hive has an Administrator who sets it up and manages it. The management of Hives is performed using an Admin App, which provides access to a smart contract called the Beekeeper. An ERC20 utility token called the Hive Token (HVT) provides access to the Hive Power ecosystem.
Different Components Of The Hive Power Platform:
• Worker
The basic component of a Hive is the Worker. A Worker is a blockchain-enabled electrical meter that measures energy production and consumption and is linked to a prosumer, e.g. a single appliance, a single-family household, a storage system, a solar power plant, an industrial facility, etc. A Worker measures and certifies its own energy production and consumption, and participates in the Hive energy market exchange.
The Worker acts as the interface between the prosumer and the electrical grid and is equipped with a hardware oracle containing a cryptographically attestable anti-tampering sensor (cf. 7.3). The Worker also provides a forecasting service that predicts the energy consumption and production of the prosumer and an energy bidding system interacting with the Hive. A Hive can be composed of many Workers, while a Worker can only belong to one Hive.
•Queen
Each Hive contains a Queen, which collects the energy forecasts and coordinates the energy production and consumption of the Workers in the Hive. It aggregates the data, and communicates it back to the Hive in an anonymous format. The Queen collects the energy consumption and production data of the Workers and handles the payments in the energy community.
• Hive
A Hive is a distributed energy market platform regulated through smart contracts where every prosumer can buy and sell electrical energy. A Hive is able to interact with the external grid as a single entity, selling and buying energy and services. As shown in Figure 1, each Hive contains of a Queen who coordinates the Hive energy production and distribution, and a set of Workers. Workers in the Hive can exchange energy between each other via the Queen.
• Hive Administrator
Each Hive has a unique Administrator. Typically, the Administrator also manages the local grid infrastructure and ensures that the Ethereum Meters are installed correctly. It could be for example the distribution system operator or a multi-unit building manager. The Hive Administrator retains a small fee of the Workers stable token payments, in order to cover the costs of the infrastructure. Hive Power also receives a small fee, to support the maintenance of the Hive Power platform and finance its development. In the future, the Hive Administrator could be a smart contract with multiple owners.
• Beekeeper
In the Hive Power framework the interaction between a Hive and its Administrator is not direct, but it is mediated by a smart contract called the Beekeeper, which will be exhaustively explained in the next paragraph.
Smart contracts
In order to provide an Ethereum-compliant platform and to manage the aforementioned Hives with the related components (Workes and Queen), a set of smart contracts will be developed and deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. In this chapter the two more significant contracts, named Beekeeper and Hive, will be explained in detail. Besides, others contracts will be provided to support the functionalities of the main ones (e.g. the management of a list containing the meters allowed to be added to a hive, the management of tariffs, etc.). Figure 2 shows the main interactions between Beekeeper, Hive and the auxiliary contracts.
• Beekeeper contract
The Beekeeper contract provides a list of functionalities, the main related to hives management. Through it, a generic Hive Administrator is able to add, modify and delete hives. The Beekeeper exploits other auxiliary contracts to obtain mandatory informations: a list of the meters allowed to be used in a hive, a HVT vault where the HVTs needed to create a hive can be staked, a token vault related to the stable coins exploited by each hive, a set of tariffs and a list of hives to maintain a track of all the created instances.
Figure 2: Interactions between the Hive Power contracts
The Hive Administrator is able to modify one of its hives typically adding or removing meters. Besides, Beekeeper has also to manage some of the aforementioned auxiliary contracts, e.g. adding new entries in the meters list. The Beekeeper contract is upgradeable in order to be compatible with the addition of new functionalities and security updates. In the future Hive Power will set up a governance system to allow all HVT holders to provide input and feedback on the upgrades of the Beekeeper Contract, allowing them to address the development of this service, and as a consequence, to have meaningful influence on the entire project framework.
• Hive contract
The Hive smart contract has the main functionality to manage a single hive. An instance of this contract is deployed on the blockchain by the Beekeeper if a sufficient staking of HVTs is provided. As Beekeeper, Hive exploits other contracts to properly work, e.g. the aforementioned meters list with the related features (adding/dropping meters). For each worker, Hive is able to send data about produced/consumed energy and consequently receive/pay stable coins using the related token vault. Similarly to Beekeeper, Hive contract is upgradeable in order to provide improvements in terms of new functionalities and security issues.
Scalability aspects
• The problem
Currently blockchain technology is not exploitable for the management of all the acquired data in typical IoT applications such as Hive Power platform. The amount of measurements is too high to be reasonably stored in a public Ethereum blockchain. The reason is mainly the high gas cost to pay for each transaction on the chain. In the first releases, the Ethereum blockchain will be fundamentally used for administrative aspects (e.g. creating/deleting hives) and to store informations related to monthly production/consumption of energy and revenues/payments of the Workers.
• The solution
In the first releases the data needed by the platform (e.g. the workers energy measurements, with a typical resolution of 15 minutes) will be saved in an off-chain custom framework provided by Hive Power. In the future, Hive Power will migrate the custom implementation to State 6 Channels technology, which provides secure, fast and economic micro-transactions and can be automatically connected to Ethereum blockchain. The migration will be actuated integrating Hive Power platform with generic State-channels frameworks like Raiden Network (https://raiden. network) or Liquidity Network (https://liquidity.network).
Apps
Admin App
The Admin App is a web application used by each Hive Administrator to maintain its own Hives. The access to the Admin App is granted by using the Hive Administrator’s HVT wallet. The main features of the application are:
• Beekeeper interface: The Hive Administrator is able to interact with the Beekeeper Service for the general management of the Hive (e.g. creation, adding of a new meter/Worker, etc.).
• Hive supervision: The Hive Administrator can monitor the Hive status (e.g. statistics about the energy consumption/production of the entire Hive, comparison of the Workers’ forecasts, chart of best performing Workers, etc.).
• Fiat status and withdrawal: The Hive Administrator can monitor the status of its stable token account and can purchase stable tokens to deposit into the account or can withdraw stable tokens from the account and exchange them for fiat currency.
User App
The User App is the preferred method to interact with the Hive. The main principle behind this app is “install and forget”. After the initial setup of the User App, the user can “forget” about it, because the Hive mechanism automatically takes care of normal daily operations. The main features of the app are:
• Cost savings: Users are able to see the amount of local energy used by the Hive, and the cost savings compared to regular utility tariffs.
• Energy stats: Worker Owners are able to access useful energy statistics of their Workers.
• Credit fill-in: Users can register a credit card to automatically refill the Worker’s wallet with currencies, using a third-party exchange service. Using an ERC20 stable token as fiat money will effectively protect the prosumers against price volatility.
Tokens
There are two types of tokens required to operate the Hive Power platform. The first is the HVT token, which is used to create, control, and manage the operations of the Hives and the technical governance of the platform. The second type of token (a third-party stable token) is used for all transactions and payments within the Hive Power platform.
Hive Token (HVT)
The Hive Token (HVT) is a standard ERC20 Ethereum token managed by a smart contract. The HVT token is used for the creation and management of Hives, including the registration of Ethereum Meters within a Hive, and participation of the Hive Administrator in the technical governance issues of the Hive Power platform. HVTs have a maximum supply (100’000’000) and will be created only once, during the upcoming crowdsale.
•Hive management
An admininstrator requires HVTs in order to create a new Hive. To open a Hive, the admininstrator sends the required HVTs to the Beekeeper Contract. The Beekeeper Contract performs a “burn and stake” operation on the HVTs received, that is, 50% of the HVTs are “burned”, meaning taken permanently out of supply, and the remaining 50% are “staked” inside the contract. The burn function is a mechanism to discourage a Hive Administrator from performing unnecessary Hive management operations. It also serves to achieve and maintain the stable functioning of the Hive Power platform.
After the creation of a new Hive, the Hive Administrator can send additional HVTs to the Beekeeper Contract in order to register Ethereum Meters (Workers) in the Hive’s Meter List. When adding meters to the Hive, the Beekeeper Contract follows the same “burn and stake” mechanism as in the Hive creation. When a Hive is destroyed or a meter is removed from the Hive, the remaining 50% of the HVT tokens that were staked but not burned at the Hive creation, are sent back to the Hive Administrator’s HVT wallet. The cost to create a Hive will be decided before the launch of Hive Power 1.0. The amount of HVT required to create a Hive will vary in order to ensure most equitable cost at all times.
•Governance
The Hive Power platform is designed as a community platform for Hive Administrators. Hive Administrators, who stake HVTs in the Beekeeper Contract, will be allowed to participate in decisions regarding the technical governance of the Hive Power platform. More specifically, Hive Administrators can vote on proposals to upgrade the Beekeeper Contract. In order to exclude potential speculative voters, only Hive Administrators will be allowed to participate in the governance process. Moreover, the voting power of Hive Administrators will be weighted accordingly to the date they began staking HTVs in the Hive Power platform. That means that active, long-term Hive Administrators will have more voting power on technical governance issues within the platform.
Stable Tokens
The Hive Power platform is designed as an open framework that can be used for multiple purposes by any actor anywhere in the world. Although the platform is built on the Ethereum blockchain, the value of the Ethereum token is not stable enough to be used for Hive energy payments without the integration of external price oracles, which is a complex solution. Therefore, to protect against volatility, the energy payments within the Hive Power platform will be conducted via stable tokens that are pegged to national currencies or another type of stable asset.
The Hive Administrator can decide at the time of Hive creation the stable token they want to use for energy transactions within the Hive. The Hive platform is capable of managing the interconnection of the Hives using different stable tokens. The interconnection will be ensured through decentralized token exchange protocols such as https://0xproject.com/ or https://swap.tech/. Stable token frameworks are being actively developed. DAI (https://makerdao.com/) is the first stable ECR20 cryptocurrency pegged to the US Dollar (1 DAI = 1 USD). It automatically adjusts to changing market conditions in order to stabilize its value against major world currencies. Because of its stability, it will be the first stable token integrated into the Hive Power platform. As the Ethereum ecosystem matures, additional stable tokens will be added to the platform.
Use cases
The Hive Power platform can be used to optimize the behavior of Workers and the management of energy produced by every node of the network. In the following paragraphs, we describe three main user cases for the platform.
Self-consumption Communities (SCC)
Self-consumption Communities consist of a set of prosumers that exchange energy to maximize the group’s autarky. Electrical generators and consumers in an SCC must be connected to lowvoltage feeders on the same substation. They can internally optimize the synchronization of their energy production/consumption by exploiting electric storage and demand-side management. An example of a SCC is a condominium where the solar energy produced on the rooftop is consumed by the tenants. Other members of the community, living in the same geographical district, also consume the solar energy produced from their own rooftops.
When the solar system happens not to produce enough (e.g. at night or during cloudy days), the necessary electricity can be bought from the DSO grid. Similarly, the community can also sell excess solar power to the national grid (e.g. during summer days) and receive financial remuneration. Storage batteries can be used to optimize the self-consumption capabilities of the SCC network. The clear economic advantage of an SCC comes from the large gap between purchase prices of energy (around 0.20 USD/kWh) and the selling price of energy (around 0.05 USD/kWh) from the national grid.
Micro-Grid
As defined by United States Department of Energy, micro-grids are groups of interconnected energy loads and distributed energy resources within clearly defined electrical boundaries that act as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. Several energy associations agree that microgrids will enjoy a rapid deployment in the coming years as stated by the International Renewable Energy Agency in the IRENA Innovation Outlook: Renewable Minigrids:
-Renewable mini-grids continue to gain momentum as energy solutions in areas where energy demand is not fulfilled, and where grid extension is not a cost-effective alternative. Renewable mini-grids are reaching maturity, as shown by their improved reliability, reduced environmental impact, enabling of increased local control over energy used, and sustained cost reductions. Renewable mini-grids represent a growing market that is potentially worth more than USD 200 billion annually. Renewables can be mixed with diesel-fueled capacity to convert between 50 and 250 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to hybrid mini-grids. We distinguish two kinds of micro-grids, which will be operated within the Hive Power platform according to different smart-pricing schemes:
• Commercial and institutional (C&I) micro-grids, aggregating existing on-site energy generation with multiple loads that are located in closely geography, and in which the Administrator is able to easily manage them. Examples are military bases and industrial microgrids, where the security of the power supply security and its reliability are very important. 15 C&I micro-grids can connect and disconnect from the grid to enable it to operate in both grid-connected or island-mode. This case is similar to an SCC, where the energy generation capacity is large enough to cover most of the local energy demand.
• Remote micro-grids are never connected to the national grid and operate in island mode because of economic issues or geography location. In this case, it is fundamental to guarantee the power supply for critical loads (such as emergency rooms) and optimize the management of storage batteries. We aim to achieve this with smart pricing algorithms that force users to collaborate in order to guarantee optimal network performance.
Distribution Grid
The third use case concerns the low-voltage distribution grids, where an entire geographical district is connected to the national medium-voltage grid, involving a few or possibly hundreds of prosumers with different profiles:
• Residential houses, with domestic energy loads and eventually controllable loads such as heat pumps and water boilers
• Commercial, such as offices, small shops and malls
• Industrial, with small factories consuming and producing a relevant quantity of energy
The Hive Power platform users can employ energy generation systems, which are typically solar, and storage such as electric batteries. Innovative nodes of the networks can include district batteries (that can profit from economy of scale and higher efficiency), shared solar plants (e.g. in condominiums or parking lots) and electric vehicle charging stations. The end result is that all network users benefit from participating in the Hive Power platform, thanks to convenient tariffs (to buy and sell energy), so their assets (solar and batteries) become more profitable, providing economic benefits to both energy producers and consumers.
Roadmap
The Hive Power roadmap begins with the launch of a Token Generation Event, to finance the development and the implementation of an energy exchange platform for the aforementioned use cases. Our first goal is to develop an open platform that can be used by any energy actor (e.g. a DSO, a Self-consumption Community manager or a micro-grid manager). Initially we will focus on the development, testing and validation of the Hive energy market design using an energy meter prototype, and then we will finalize the entire system design. The testing of the platform will take place in one of the largest pilot and demonstration projects in Europe. In the meantime, we will continue ongoing discussions with potential partners interested in adding value to their projects by incorporating the Hive Power platform into their hardware and software energy solutions.
Team
The founders of Hive Power have a wide range of academic and interdisciplinary backgrounds in the field of energy distribution grids/smart grids, ranging from micro-technical engineering to applied mathematics and informatics. Over the last seven years the team worked hard to develop a unique, effective and innovative algorithm based on a self-learning approach addressing the typical challenges of energy load management in smart grids. One of the largest utilities in Switzerland has integrated this approach in a new product to be sold on the Swiss market by since Autumn 2017 under the trademark GridSense.
Gianluca Corbellini
Gianluca Corbellini holds a M.Sc. in Mathematical Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, focused on mathematical modelling, optimization and artificial intelligence. He has extensive experience working with multinational corporations in the energy field, having been asset manager for photovoltaic plants and research engineer in the oil and gas industry. In the University of Applied Science and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) he is involved in the modelling of photovoltaic plants, and in the development of new business models for the optimization of smart grids. He was also a lecturer for the SUPSI course “Design of Energy Systems” regarding the design of micro-grids.
Davide Rivola
Davide Rivola is a senior researcher with a multi-disciplinary micro-engineering background. He is leading the Energy Systems research sector at SUPSI. Before his research activities he gained several years of industrial experience, designing industrial automation systems and developing real-time software for embedded electronics. During the last seven years he researched, developed and trialed in pilot projects fully decentralized energy management systems for self-consumption optimization and grid instability reduction. He is personally involved in Blockchain technology since 2013, with an enthusiasm that only grew during time.
Vasco Medici
Vasco Medici received a M.Sc. in Micro-Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and a Ph.D. in Neuroinformatics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Z¨urich. He previously worked in the development of real-time 3D video-based tracking applications. He currently leads the Intelligent Energy Systems Team at SUPSI, where he also teaches the “Introduction to Smart Grid” course. His main competences are system identification, algorithmics, modeling and simulation. He is the coordinator at SUPSI for the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research on Future Swiss Electrical Infrastructure (SCCER FURIES). In close collaboration with industrial partners, his team runs a number of pilot projects in the field of demand side management applied to smart grids.
Lorenzo Nespoli
Lorenzo Nespoli received the M.Sc. degree in Energy Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2013. Since 2014 he works on multiphysics simulations and electric grid optimization at SUPSI, where he is lecturer for the “Introduction to Smart Grid” course. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where he is working on decentralized control algorithms and model-based forecasts for demand side management in the distribution grid, in the context of Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research - Future Swiss Electrical Infrastructure SCCER FURIES.
Davide Strepparava
Davide Strepparava is a researcher of the Intelligent Energy Systems Team at the Institute for Sustainability Applied to the Built Environment at SUPSI. He received a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Politecnico di Milano. Before his academic career he worked for several years in the building automation and access control industries. He has a high level of experience in data science and database management. At SUPSI he is involved in research projects mainly related to the monitoring of solar plants and smart grids. Over the past two years he has worked extensively with blockchain technology, especially focused on the Ethereum platform, working on research projects related to decentralized and smart energy markets.
For More Informations:
Website: https://www.hivepower.tech/
Whitepaper: https://v.fastcdn.co/u/a25ac79a/29853262-0-Hive-Power-WP-1.3.pdf
Bitcointalk URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3378072.0
Bitcointalk Ann: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2097220.0
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hive_power
Telegram: https://t.me/hivepower
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HivePower/
Authored By: Richard Ayebaesin
Bitcointalk Username: ayeba
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