Fault Management in MVDC Grids Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts: A Decentralization Approach

Abstract

Medium-voltage direct-current (MVDC) networks facilitate the integration of renewable generation, energy storage, and power-electronic converters, but their protection requires rapid local fault response and reliable coordination among distributed components. This paper proposes a proof-of-concept decentralized fault-management architecture that separates local anomaly detection from permissioned-blockchain-based coordination and auditing governed by a smart-contract state machine. Beyond an initial paired 50-run threshold study, a fixed-seed Monte Carlo stress test involving 2,000 events evaluates threshold uncertainty, temporary voltage sags, high-impedance-fault surrogates, sensor errors, reported-data manipulation, and 5% message loss. At thresholds of 0.6, 0.7, and 0.8 pu, the measured sensitivities were 61.73%, 77.05%, and 91.36%, respectively, while the corresponding false-positive rates were 0%, 0%, and 5.49%. Under a common logical benchmark, the blockchain-quorum coordination path achieved 91.85% accuracy and 89.59% sensitivity, with a modeled coordination latency of 1.362 ± 0.185 s. These latency results indicate that blockchain-based coordination is unsuitable as a replacement for primary high-speed DC protection. Additional quorum-delivery and message-complexity models quantify the effects of validator count and packet loss. Overall, the results demonstrate the architectural feasibility of blockchain-assisted MVDC coordination, including traceable state sequencing and reproducible logical evaluation, within the assumptions of the proposed models. Electromagnetic-transient (EMT) simulation, converter and breaker modeling, network emulation, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing are required before field deployment.