This was PONTON’s contribution to the hackathon “What the Data!?”, organised by Cybus at the Energie-Campus of Hamburg University of Applied Sciences – and we made it among the winners!

Goal of the hackathon was to use a range of technical devices through a unified SCADA APIs that has been developed by Cybus for monitoring and control. The devices are typical consumers or generators of energy such as a battery, an electric vehicle, an electrolyser, a CHP plant, a methaniser, etc.  PONTON contributed with the demo “Using the Blockchain for the market-based Coordination of Flexibility within the Microgrid” which has received some enthusiastic interest.

PONTON developed a simulation of a local energy market, based on EPEX Spot next hour prices. This price curve was used to drive the behaviour of participating batteries and the electrolyser. The system was developed using an agent-based architecture to connect devices as market participants to the local marketplace. Each agent is controlled by an individual behaviour – either acting as a consumer, as a generator, or both. The marketplace itself was built based on blockchain technology.

For the electrolyser we developed a trading strategy that fulfils two goals: consume 1 MWh within the simulated runtime of 24 hours and buy hourly chunks of electricity – depending on the actual head-hour market price. The agent was additionally supplied with intraday forecast data such that it not just traded head hours but all intraday slots. 

It was a pleasure for People from PONTON to have worked together with our ad-hoc hacking partner Maximilian from RABOT. His knowledge in short-term trading helped round up agent behaviours in a realistic way. We are looking forward to do the next project together with Max!