Economic Optimal Coordinated Dispatch of Power for Community Users Considering Shared Energy Storage and Demand Response under Blockchain
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
1. It is necessary to define all the parameters that are in the formula (4). The definition of the term Ps,i(t) is missing.
2. On line 376, correct the editing of the maximum value (max) relative to the upper limit of SOC.
3. On line 522, check the tense after the indication of the parameters of community users' power utility function (“v, u, w, z are...”).
4. It is necessary to correct the caption of Figure 8 and revise the text of lines 615 to 628.
5. In line 640 it is necessary to put the multiple of the power measurement unit in lower case (k).
6. Standardize the number of decimal places in all tables of the article.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1 Comments
Point 1: It is necessary to define all the parameters that are in the formula (4). The definition of the term Ps,i(t) is missing.
Response 1: Sorry, it's a clerical error on the part of the authors here. We have modified “Ps,i(t)” into “Pb,i(t)” in the formula (4). Pb,i(t) has been explained in the paper, representing the power purchased from the grid for the community user during period.
Point 2: On line 376, correct the editing of the maximum value (max) relative to the upper limit of SOC.
Response 2: Thank you for your careful review, and we have made the modifications.
Point 3: On line 522, check the tense after the indication of the parameters of community users' power utility function (“v, u, w, z are...”).
Response 3: Sorry. We have modified “is” to “are”.
Point 4: It is necessary to correct the caption of Figure 8 and revise the text of lines 615 to 628.
Response 4: I am very sorry that I did not understand your comment. Figure 8 reflects the optimal dispatching strategy for Community 2, which is similar to Figure 7 and Figure 9. And we don't see any specific corrections needed at this point. If we need to correct it, can you please give us a specific question? During the revision process,we found that the 'C' in "community 2" in line 618 is not capitalized, which may cause you to have trouble reading. And we have modified it to "Communnity 2".
Point 5: In line 640 it is necessary to put the multiple of the power measurement unit in lower case (k).
Response 5: Thank you for your careful review and modifications have been made. We also double-checked the rest of the paper and found similar problems and corrected them. The modifications have been marked in red.
Point 6: Standardize the number of decimal places in all tables of the article.
Response 6: We have standardized the decimal places of all data to be displayed to two decimal places, except for Table 8 (which is retained to three decimal places for a more accurate representation of the weights). The modifications have been marked in red.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is generally well written and describes an interesting project, well structured around the opportunities for shared energy storage and the role of blockchain in facilitating this.
A recurring theme in my comments is that I feel you over-claim f the role of blockchain, and underplay the contributions of your novel approaches in the underlying system design and optimization. I believe the paper makes useful contributions in both.
In some places the language is much too technical on the blockchain technology, and you need to make clear what the underlying system structure ad operation is, before stating how that is implemented formally in the blockchain.
Title: consider changing the wording from “Dispatch of Community Users” as it not the uers themselves being dispatched!
Line 10 “User-side uses”: check phrase has intended meaning, as unclear
Lines 23-29: Blockchain term is used too frequently. Surely the innovation here is the architecture of the community scheme, and the optimisation, as well as the blockchain part: But this part of the abstract, gives almost all attention to the benefits of blockchain itself. Perhaps here mention a few of the blockchain benefits as per Line 97, helping facilitate the other innovations?
L43: “The social electricity consumption mode is gradu-43 ally being transformed, particularly in the energy consumption segment, into a form with 44 a response to user demand at its core” is not clear. What is ‘social electricity consumption mode’ ?? And “response to user demand”…isn’t DR the response by users to electricity system needs ?
L47 reform ,new
Lines 70-85: Is their any guidance in the national thinking about the capacity of Shared energy storage? What sort of scale is this expected to be? And connected to distribution networks rather than even larger grid-scale connected to transmission network?
L90: “requires cyber-physical fusion.” Please express this more clearly! And how might it differ from the centralised renewable energy trading, which of course does also involved large amount of digital data, machine learning, optimisation modelling etc.
L100: perhaps better “facilitated by blockchain technology”?
L100-101: please express this more directly as overall aims for the paper, which you can return to in the discussion
L160: “which remains to be studied. For example, He et al. (2021)” seems contradictory to say unstudied and then mention a study…please clarify.
L161 “energy pawn” is not a known term…suggest re-phrase
Lit review: please check that you have covered any relevant papers arising from the EU project on P2P: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/890345
Lit review generally: given the focus of the work on Blockchain implementation, you need to make a stronger argument that standard communications and techniques could not achieve the sort of peer-peer shared storage system proposed here. Why could this not be achieved with some central authority coordinating, with the necessary criteria for operation? Why is Blockchain needed?
Fig 1 and lines 199 to 230: Please improve the clarity about the participants referred to through the text here, and the whole paper. Perhaps add some definitions, and then revise the paper to make sure you are using the terms accurately. Eg a user is one household or business (?), a community of users is a collection of individual users that liaise with one another (?). You tent to use the term “community user” which is really unclear! Then you also use community customer…is this different? And you say each community customer can be seen as microgrid…? If community customer is one household, then not helpful to suggest that is seen as a microgrid. And adds in ‘alliance’ to, and then nodes…
L211-213 please clarify, perhaps by giving an example of what you mean by a device
Section 3 and elsewhere: you refer to the data and forecasts that users must submit. Somewhere there needs to be discussion about how this is achieved in practice, since most users will be incapable, or disinterested, to do this personally. In 5.1 the role of smart contracts is clear as the place that rules are embedded, but still unclear how the forecsts are generated etc.
L285: Sentence phrased in the past…is this proposing a scenario? Clarify, as confusing
L315 refer to the DR, but have you already specified some form of signal or incentive on which DR will be based? I think a broad mention if that is needed in section 3.
L330 dispatching of what?
Eqn 4: suggest change subscript t for transfer load as confusing with t for time
What is Ps ? Define first time
L344 “more unified describe”…revise wording
Eqn 10: why adding SES supercsipt here when not used in eqn 2? And in Eqn 10 have dropped the subscript i for Pc and Pd ?
382: this is not the standard set of layers (eg contract is usually in Application layer, and incentive layer is not common). Please review first the standard layers and then show your developments of that.
L405 ethernet or Etherium?
Overall: is the energy intensity of bitcoin mining relevant here? Ifs o, needs mentioning.
L443-444 This language will mean nothing to a non specialist in blockchain. You need to specify the process in natural language before translating it formally.
L473 ‘Energy abandonment’ is not a common term…please reword
L516 “New energy power” is not a common term…please reword
L521 “decline power of electricity” ??
Fig 5: does ‘each community’ mean ‘each community user’, if not, can you indicate how the community performance is derived from the set of community users within it?…check and revise
L567 power is in kW not kWh
6.2.1 useful to add to the scenario 1 and 2 definitions whether demand response is included. And scenario 2 definition: clarify that they are connected to shared storage but without optimisation across?? Might it be more interesting for scenario 2 to have separate storage per community, with an aggregate capacity the same as the shared capacity in scenario 3, etc? Or this could be a 4th scenario to show the benefit of sharing storage.
Discussion: Point (2): the success of the scheme is attributed to the use of blockchain. However is success not largely due to the development of sensible benefit sharing rules/algorithms? These are conveniently implemented using blockchain, which then solves some issues of trust etc. If this is correct, please revisit the discussion section and make a clearer distinction between the contributions from the optimisation algorithm and the blockchain implementation.
Author Response
Responds to the reviewer 2 comments:
Point 1: A recurring theme in my comments is that I feel you over-claim f the role of blockchain, and underplay the contributions of your novel approaches in the underlying system design and optimization. I believe the paper makes useful contributions in both. In some places the language is much too technical on the blockchain technology, and you need to make clear what the underlying system structure ad operation is, before stating how that is implemented formally in the blockchain.
Response 1: Thank you for your affirmation of our work. The question you raised is very relevant, and the modifications to all the content below are mainly based on the ideas of your comment.
Point 2: Title: consider changing the wording from “Dispatch of Community Users” as it not the uers themselves being dispatched!
Response 2: We have made the following modifications to address your question: “Dispatch of Community Users” to “Dispatch of Communities Power”. This avoids ambiguity. Please confirm with the editor whether this is feasible.
Point 3: Line 10 “User-side uses”: check phrase has intended meaning, as unclear.
Response 3: Lines 10-11 have changed into: “The user side uses shared energy storage to coordinated operation, which becomes a new energy utilization scheme.”
Point 4: Lines 23-29: Blockchain term is used too frequently. Surely the innovation here is the architecture of the community scheme, and the optimisation, as well as the blockchain part: But this part of the abstract, gives almost all attention to the benefits of blockchain itself. Perhaps here mention a few of the blockchain benefits as per Line 97, helping facilitate the other innovations?
Response 4: In the previous manuscript, Lines 20-23 introduced the main content of the third part of the article, and Line 24 followed by elaborated on the innovation and benefits. We rewrote it based on the comments. In lines 20-23, the content of "Third,..." and the rest of it has been refined and edited to eliminate some Blockchain terms. Line 24, we removed "under the blockchain" and emphasized the benefits of dispatching optimization policies. We reorganized the text of "Lines 27-29" to introduce the role of blockchain technology in solving trust and innovation problems. In general, we rewrote here as follows:
(Lines 20-29)Thirdly, the blockchain application scheme of community user coordinated dispatching is designed, including the incentive mechanism based on the improved Shapley value allocation coordination cost, and the consensus algorithm based on the change rate of users' electricity utilization utility function. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed community user coordinated dispatching strategy in this paper can effectively reduce the economic cost, reduce the power grid pressure, and promote the consumption of clean energy. The combination of the designed cost allocation and other methods with blockchain technology solves the trust problem and promotes the innovation of the power dispatching mode. This study can provide some references for the application of blockchain technology in user-side energy storage and shared energy storage.
However, we are not very confident of this modification, if my understanding of the reviewer's comments is somewhat wrong, or the reviewer is still not satisfied with my modification, please continue to point it out. I will continue to make efforts to modify it, thank you.
Point 5: L43: “The social electricity consumption mode is gradually being transformed, particularly in the energy consumption segment, into a form with a response to user demand at its core” is not clear. What is ‘social electricity consumption mode’? And “response to user demand”…isn’t DR the response by users to electricity system needs ?
Response 5: The meaning of the manuscript was really unclear before, so we rewrote it and modified it as follows:
(Lines 43-47) The traditional mode of social electricity utilization has been changed. Users participate in the demand response and adjust the energy utilization plan, which can reduce the electricity utilization cost while meeting the energy demand. In the process, advanced digital technology supports more complex market mechanisms and trading modes, and the user has the dual identity of power user and power regulator.
Here, "social electricity consumption mode" refers to the behavior mode of electricity utilization and electricity purchasing by social electricity users. In the traditional mode, users simply purchase electricity according to the demand without participating in the demand response.
Point 6: L47 reform ,new
Response 6: Thank you for your careful check and the space position has been adjusted.
Point 7: Lines 70-85: Is their any guidance in the national thinking about the capacity of Shared energy storage? What sort of scale is this expected to be? And connected to distribution networks rather than even larger grid-scale connected to transmission network?
Response 7: “Shared energy storage” is a commercial operation mode of energy storage. The owner of the “shared energy storage” system in this paper is an independent energy storage power station. For “shared energy storage”, national policies mainly guide its operation mode and the market mechanism. As for “independent energy storage”, China has introduced a series of policies related to independent energy storage since the end of 2021. According to incomplete statistics, as of April 2023, among 22.2GW/53.8GWh new energy storage demonstration projects released by Chinese provinces, independent or shared energy storage projects have reached 20.0GW/47.4GWh, accounting for 92% of the power scale.
The purpose of using an energy storage system is to solve the problem of renewable energy consumption. Community users are equipped with distributed power generation devices, and the use of shared energy storage is conducive to the local consumption of distributed new energy power generation. Therefore, the SES station in this paper is connected to the distribution network (rather than the transmission network) and can directly distribute power to users. For larger energy storage projects, it may be connected to the grid or a power plant.
Scale situation of energy storage development driven by the policy was added to the manuscript. (Lines 83-86)
Point 8: L90: “requires cyber-physical fusion.” Please express this more clearly! And how might it differ from the centralised renewable energy trading, which of course does also involved large amount of digital data, machine learning, optimisation modelling etc.
Response 8: Here we have made serious revisions and added some explanations, including the disadvantages of centralized power trading, the participation of emerging energy agents in the power market, and the characteristics of distributed power trading, etc. The details are as follows:
(Lines 92-102)Traditional renewable energy trading is mainly managed by centralized mechanisms. Each node needs to upload a large amount of real-time information to the central node of the trading and integrate and release information in real-time through the centralized structure, which leads to high operating costs, poor anti-risk ability, information opacity, and other problems. As shared energy storage and Users who can meet demand response participate in the electricity market as emerging energy agents, on the one hand, distributed power and data communication will occur frequently due to a large number of agents and a more complex supply-demand relationship. On the other hand, some distributed power trading gradually shows the characteristics of free access to each unit, point-to-point interaction, and decentralized coordination. Therefore, more digital and intelligent technologies are needed to support the above dispatching and trading processes.
Point 9: L100: perhaps better “facilitated by blockchain technology”? L100-101: please express this more directly as overall aims for the paper, which you can return to in the discussion
Response 9: Thank you for your suggestion. We have changed the word “is based” to “facilitated by”.
Point 10: L160: “which remains to be studied. For example, He et al. (2021)” seems contradictory to say unstudied and then mention a study…please clarify.
Response 10: We have amended the paragraph to remove the phrase “which remains to be studied” so that the paragraph no longer contradicts itself.
Point 11: L161 “energy pawn” is not a known term…suggest re-phrase
Response 11: “Energy pawn” is the term in literature [35], which represents the stakeholders in a community P2P energy trading and is responsible for establishing an energy sharing network. In this paper, “an energy pawn” is modified to “one stakeholder”.
Point 12: Lit review: please check that you have covered any relevant papers arising from the EU project on P2P: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/890345
Response 12: We appreciate the information you provided, and we found many interesting reports and articles. We have included some citations in our literature review (e.g., including but not limited to the literature[1, 2])
Point 13: Lit review generally: given the focus of the work on Blockchain implementation, you need to make a stronger argument that standard communications and techniques could not achieve the sort of peer-peer shared storage system proposed here. Why could this not be achieved with some central authority coordinating, with the necessary criteria for operation? Why is Blockchain needed?
Response 13:The role of blockchain in peer-peer shared storage systems is emphasized in the new manuscript. For example, in Section 1 Introduction, the disadvantages of traditional centralized transactions and the advantages of the blockchain-backed dispatching model are emphasized. Also in Section 2 Literature Review, stronger words are added to support the applicability of blockchain technology in the dispatching model proposed in this paper. The details are as follows:
(Lines 168-173)Although the economics and development prospects of shared energy storage have been verified, the traditional centralized energy trading model of centralized control, dispatching, and bidding are not only inefficient but also difficult to ensure the security of trading information [3]. It is also not in line with the characteristics of "openness, peer-to-peer, interconnection, and sharing" of the Energy Internet. The actual community electricity dispatching is more suitable for adopting the de-centralized mechanism .
(Lines 177-185)Blockchain is a new technology that combines distributed data storage, peer-to-peer transmission, and encryption mechanisms together. As a distributed, decentralized, and information-secure network database system, blockchain has a natural matching advantage with distributed power trading of multiple community users containing shared energy storage [4]. Blockchain technology can support frequent communication between multiple community users with the encrypted transmission. Moreover, it has a similar topological form as the system interconnected with multiple community users and shared energy storage. It has strong scalability and compatibility that is more difficult to achieve with centralized dispatch.
Point 14: Fig 1 and lines 199 to 230: Please improve the clarity about the participants referred to through the text here, and the whole paper. Perhaps add some definitions, and then revise the paper to make sure you are using the terms accurately. Eg a user is one household or business (?), a community of users is a collection of individual users that liaise with one another (?). You tent to use the term “community user” which is really unclear! Then you also use community customer…is this different? And you say each community customer can be seen as microgrid…? If community customer is one household, then not helpful to suggest that is seen as a microgrid. And adds in ‘alliance’ to, and then nodes…
Response 14: We are very apologetic for the trouble caused to the reviewers due to our unclear definition. We believe that this problem is very serious, as it may also lead to difficulties for readers to understand our paper. First of all, we would like to clarify the meaning of one term in the previous manuscript.
‘User’: refers to electricity consumers in general.
‘Community user’: an electricity consumer that geographically exists in the form of a community organization. This community may contain many households and small businesses that need electricity, but since they may be equipped with distributed generation units, their identity will switch to the producer. But in general, it is still mostly a ‘user’.
The term 'community customer' is a mistake in our writing and is actually ‘community user’.
‘alliance’ means that when multiple communities coordinate dispatch, they can be seen as an alliance due to the cooperation that exists between them.
‘nodes’ is the term corresponding to each node in the blockchain, and a community can be a node in the blockchain.
The main object of the manuscript is ‘community’. Specifically, it is the power coordination and dispatch problem among them. Each community may have distributed generations unit and power customers, thus being a small microgrid to the outside.
In order to improve the clarity of the object of study in the manuscript, we have redefined the community. The term “community” is used consistently and has been modified throughout the text.(lines 223-227) The optimization target is to minimize the total cost of multiple communities, that is, the total cost of community alliance. Community alliance is also explained in line 347. Other unclear statements have been revised correctly to make their meaning clearer. Because there were too many modifications, not all of them were marked. In the abstract and section 3, we demonstrated some modifications, marked in blue font.
Point 15:L211-213 please clarify, perhaps by giving an example of what you mean by a device
Response 15: The devices we refer to here include distributed power sources and loads, such as micro source devices (distributed PV generators, etc.), reducible loads (e.g. air conditions, etc.), and transferable loads (e.g. washing machines, dishwashers, etc.). With modifications, we have added some examples to line 234 to clarify.
Point 16: Section 3 and elsewhere: you refer to the data and forecasts that users must submit. Somewhere there needs to be discussion about how this is achieved in practice, since most users will be incapable, or disinterested, to do this personally. In 5.1 the role of smart contracts is clear as the place that rules are embedded, but still unclear how the forecsts are generated etc.
Response 16: Since the text considers the community as a whole to coordinate dispatch with other communities, it is not necessary for each household or business to provide its own data. Rather, the community provides aggregate forecast data that serves as a guide for the second day of electricity trading. In this manuscript, we have revised some wording to address this issue and reduced the amount of text that would create confusion.
In addition, we only consider this aspect of forecasting here as a pre-dispatch preparation and do not expand the discussion. The methods for generating power forecasting and load power forecasting have been previously studied specifically in our other papers (e.g., Ref. [5-7]).
Point 17: L285: Sentence phrased in the past…is this proposing a scenario? Clarify, as confusing
Response 17:We have changed the word “has attracted” to “is attracting”.
Point 18: L315 refer to the DR, but have you already specified some form of signal or incentive on which DR will be based? I think a broad mention if that is needed in section 3.
Response 18:Thank you a lot for this comment. Communities in the manuscript participate in DR mainly because they are guided by the electricity price signals. The time of use price mechanism leads communities to adjust their electricity load demand through load reduction and transfer, thus reducing the cost of electricity consumption. We briefly mention some parts of DR in the old manuscript in the introduction and Section 3. In response, we have added more explanation in Section 3, lines 235-237.
Point 19: L330 dispatching of what?
Response 19: Here we have changed the wording to be: “dispatching of power for communities”.
Point 20: Eqn 4: suggest change subscript t for transfer load as confusing with t for time
Response 20: Thank you for your suggestion. We have revised the to in the formula to prevent confusion.
Point 21: What is Ps? Define first time.
Response 21: We are so sorry that there is a clerical error on the part of the authors. Ps,i(t) in Eqn 4 has been modified to Pb,i(t), which was explained in the above text and represents the power purchased from the grid for the community during period.
Point 22: L344 “more unified describe”…revise wording
Response 22: We changed the word “more unified” to “more concrete”.
Point 23: Eqn 10: why adding SES supercsipt here when not used in eqn 2? And in Eqn 10 have dropped the subscript i for Pc and Pd ?
Response 23: and in Equation 10 are the charging and discharging power during period of the SES system, therefore SES superscript is added. And and in Equation 2 are the charging and discharging power of using SES the community during period, so i superscript is added. They represent different meanings. and are re-explained here in line 355 for easier understanding.
Point 24: 382: this is not the standard set of layers (eg contract is usually in Application layer, and incentive layer is not common). Please review first the standard layers and then show your developments of that.
Response 24: We reviewed the literature and added the blockchain standards hierarchy. The details are as follows:
(Lines 412-424)The standard layers of the traditional Bitcoin blockchain are the application layer, protocol layer, network layer, transport layer, and data layer[8]. And later with the development of Web 3.0 and Decentralized Ledger Technology (DLT), it is believed that the main layers of blockchain include, the infrastructure or hardware layer, data layer, network layer, consensus layer, and application and presentation layers[9]. Among them, the consensus layer is one of the most significant layers of the blockchain. This layer is responsible for transaction authentication. It is also referred to as a consensus mechanism and maintains the blockchain’s decentralized characteristic. The application layer, which is the uppermost layer of blockchain, includes various applications implemented based on blockchain technology, such as digital currency, smart contracts, etc. Combined with the communities electricity trading scenario, we divide the technical architecture of blockchain into the following six layers: data layer, network layer, consensus layer, incentive layer, contract layer, and application layer.
Point 25: L405 ethernet or Etherium?
Response 25:We have corrected “ethernet” to “Etherium”.
Point 26: Overall: is the energy intensity of bitcoin mining relevant here? Ifs o, needs mentioning.
Response 26: The consensus function and incentive mechanism designed in this paper don't involve Bitcoin mining. For a detailed explanation, please refer to Response 25 and Response 28.
Point 27: L443-444 This language will mean nothing to a non specialist in blockchain. You need to specify the process in natural language before translating it formally.
Response 27: Here we have redescribed and explained. The specific modifications are as follows.
(Lines 482-493)In addition, the classical blockchain technologies represented by Bitcoin and Etherium use consensus based on proof mechanisms such as PoW (Proof of Work) and PoS (Proof of Stake), and mostly use digital currency as an incentive mechanism. After each successful mining and confirmation, a new block is generated and the publicly elected winning book-keeping node receives the digital currency. This process relies on the nodes' computing power and financial power. The mining process of PoW consensus consumes a lot of power resources, and PoS consensus relies on the number of coins held by nodes. The more equity in a node the easier it is to gain book-keeping rights, which is more likely to cause centralization problems. Therefore, the blockchain book-keeping reward designed in this paper doesn't use computing power and tokens, instead, it is the economic cost saved by the community coordinated power dispatch.
Point 28: L473 ‘Energy abandonment’ is not a common term…please reword
Response 28: The meaning we want to express here is the waste of energy caused by photovoltaic or wind power that cannot be consumed locally. To avoid confusion, we changed ‘abandonment’ to ‘waste’.And we checked the whole article and made the corresponding changes.
Point 29: L516 “New energy power” is not a common term…please reword
Response 29: We changed “New energy power” to ”New energy generation”. However, we have a question about this issue. Perhaps the reviewer's question about asking for an uncommon term refers to “new energy”? If so, please point it out and we will continue to revise it, thank you!
Point 30: L521 “decline power of electricity” ??
Response 30: We have changed this to “the reduced power”.
Point 31: Fig 5: does ‘each community’ mean ‘each community user’, if not, can you indicate how the community performance is derived from the set of community users within it?…check and revise
Response 31: Thanks for your serious check! ‘Each community’ here means ‘each community user’. We’ve standardized the name of the community.
Point 32: L567 power is in kW not kWh
Response 32: Thank you for your serious check, we have revised it.
Point 33: 6.2.1 useful to add to the scenario 1 and 2 definitions whether demand response is included. And scenario 2 definition: clarify that they are connected to shared storage but without optimisation across?? Might it be more interesting for scenario 2 to have separate storage per community, with an aggregate capacity the same as the shared capacity in scenario 3, etc? Or this could be a 4th scenario to show the benefit of sharing storage.
Response 33: We added more detailed descriptions to Scenario 1 and Scenario 2, and corresponding changes were made in the manuscript. Scenario 1 does not include DR. Scenario 2 is connected to shared energy storage but does not have DR. For the possible existence of scenario 4 as stated by the reviewer, we have made several considerations as follows:
(1) Each community is connected to the energy storage station separately, but the electricity is not shared between them. At this time, since the unbalanced power (the difference between generation and load) of Community 1 is larger, it needs a large energy storage capacity (assuming the parameters in the manuscript, Community 1 needs to lease at least 2232.43 kWh of energy storage capacity, which has even exceeded the total capacity in case 3). Community 2 itself has a larger power generation and load power and also needs a larger storage capacity to regulate it. Community 3 is not equipped with distributed generation, so it needs the capacity of an energy storage station to regulate the electricity consumption schedule to save costs. It is clearly uneconomical for the energy storage plant to provide energy storage for Community 1/2/3 separately. Because the energy storage station needs to invest in larger energy storage equipment to meet the power balance of the Community 1/2/3. At this point, the energy storage station will increase the energy storage service fee in order to ensure a return on investment. It is not profitable for both the energy storage stations and the communities, so this situation will not happen in reality.
(2) Each community invests in energy storage equipment alone to meet its own energy storage needs. Since the marginal cost for communities to invest in energy storage equipment by themselves is high, that is why they choose to use the charging and discharging services of energy storage stations to save the cost of electricity consumption. This is also an important research background for this paper. Therefore, this base scenario is not set in the case study because we assume by default that this scenario is not economical.
(3) For Scenario 2, each community has separate storage with the same total capacity as the shared capacity in Scenario 3. In this case, it is difficult to allocate how large the capacity of each community's individual energy storage is while making the final total capacity the same as the shared capacity in Scenario 3. The case where each community has separate energy storage can be referred to the two assumptions above.
To summarize the above, we considered both scenarios when we first wrote this manuscript, but it was clear that both were uneconomical. It is also due to their uneconomical condition that we came up with the idea of using shared energy storage. Therefore it was not specifically listed as a scenario to analyze. But we would also like to sincerely ask the reviewers if you think our explanation is clearer. Perhaps you think it is still necessary to discuss the above cases in the manuscript as well? If so, please continue to point it out, thank you!
Point 34: Discussion: Point (2): the success of the scheme is attributed to the use of blockchain. However is success not largely due to the development of sensible benefit sharing rules/algorithms? These are conveniently implemented using blockchain, which then solves some issues of trust etc. If this is correct, please revisit the discussion section and make a clearer distinction between the contributions from the optimisation algorithm and the blockchain implementation.
Response 34: The reviewer's summary is right. In response, we have inserted some addition.
(Lines 802-804) The feasibility and economy of the proposed optimal dispatching and cost sharing methods are verified in the previous subsection. In the following, the above algorithms are combined with the blockchain operation process to analyze their rationality.
(Lines 825-829)It can be seen that blockchain technology can be effectively integrated with the optimization method and cost sharing method of coordinated dispatching of communities. Blockchain technology has contributed to the achievement of the above functions and created a more credible, fair, and time-sensitive environment for communities to trade electricity.
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Thanks for your helpful and detailed suggestions, we have conducted a major revision for our paper and I hope the revised manuscript will satisfy you.Once again, thank you very much for your comments and suggestions.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
