IOTA-based +CityxChange unveils demo tool for automated energy trading

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• The IOTA based “+CityxChange” released a report yesterday on the “Local DPEB trading market demonstration tool”. 
• The report describes the design of the fully automated energy trading marketplace.

The IOTA Foundation-led and EU-funded “+CityxChange” project received a “business ready” maturity rating from the European Commission’s Innovation Radar in September 2020. After the start in the “lighthouse cities” Limerick (Ireland) and Trondheim (Norway), the expansion of the project to five more cities was announced.

Now the project group around Klaus Livik (Powel), Stein Danielsen (Powel) and Michele Nati (IOTA) published a new report on a “Demonstration Tool for the Local DPEB Trading Market” yesterday. As CNF reported, the project aims to pilot the concept of a decentralized trading marketplace for energy, where producers and consumers trade energy P2P automatically.

The new report describes the market design for the software trading platform, “which is being developed for the purpose of large-scale operation of the local market.” In the process, the local energy market trading solution was implemented and demonstrated in Trondheim.

The demo tool includes trading operations with local energy resources such as PV, EV chargers (V2G), batteries, heat, flexible load and others”. Regarding the design, Nati et al. explain:

The software solution is in its kernel operating the local market similar to how trade is executed in the energy wholesale market. The solution is scalable when it comes to number and size of assets. It is also possible to configure the solution to manage multiple local markets.

Sector coupling for local market trade of energy is made possible to be demonstrated because all actual energy assets are metered with smart meters and the heat resources are presented in the local marketplace as a flexible resource/product.

The marketplace is a joint solution between Powel, IOTA and ABB, with the marketplace developed by Powel and responsible for receiving buy and sell offers from all market participants. The latter can register local facilities by using the Powel Algotrader software. The data from the machines is received by the ABB OPTIMAX units installed at each market facility location. The IOTA Tangle is responsible for the integrity of the data.

The verification service was implemented to facilitate the integration of existing infrastructure, including input data, algotrader and marketplace backend functionalities, and to ensure the integrity of data shared across different systems and actors. This makes it possible to increase trust and transparency in a
multi-stakeholders ecosystem thanks to the immutability guaranteed by the IOTA Tangle distributed ledger technologies.

Provided that a registered device reports an energy surplus or demand, the model (e.g. ABB OPTIMAX) automatically generates a supply or demand, respectively. Based on the predefined parameters, the module posts the energy surplus supply or demand using a MAM channel (IOTA Streams) on the Tangle infrastructure.

The source of the released data can thereby control who can access it. A set of standard APIs (Platform to Tangle APIs) then allows any backend optimization algorithm (such as AlgoTrader) to extract the demands and bids, validate the integrity of their source, and automatically match them to maximize a given output.

Below you can find the full +CityxChange project report on the demo tool.