Towards Cost-Efficient Management for Power Purchase Agreements Using Blockchain Technology

The difficulty for two parties to efficiently manage the contract conditions and clauses defined in a Power Purchase Agreement introduces several challenges. This manuscript addresses the current management limitations that arise during its lifecycle and offers a new vision adequate to the business implications, the need of transparency and the requirements of edge computing continuous monitoring. Considering the relevant actors, the main scenarios driven by the Power Purchase Agreements and their state-of-the-art contract designs, this manuscript proposes a novel method and procedure to enhance the cost-efficiency of the installations, granting the consumer self-management and the confidence and the guarantee of origin through a trustworthy distributed solution. The method proposed enables total traceability and integrity on the PPA performance in the long-term by applying blockchain technology. A new operational design is proposed, explaining the energy balance and energy cost formulas required by businesses. The results show that blockchain enhances the way of managing data, the data ownership, and the market opportunity.