ED-DAO: Energy Donation Algorithms Based on Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Abstract

Energy is a fundamental component of modern life, driving nearly all aspects of daily activities. As such, the inability to access energy when needed is a significant issue that requires innovative solutions. In this paper, we propose ED-DAO, a novel fully transparent and community-driven decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) designed to facilitate energy donations. We analyze the energy donation process by exploring various approaches and categorizing them based on both the source of donated energy and funding origins. We propose a novel Hybrid Energy Donation (HED) algorithm, which enables contributions from both external and internal donors. External donations are payments sourced from entities such as charities and organizations, where energy is sourced from the utility grid and prosumers. Internal donations, on the other hand, come from peer contributors with surplus energy. HED prioritizes donations in the following sequence: peer-sourced energy (P2D), utility-grid-sourced energy (UG2D), and direct energy donations by peers (P2PD). By merging these donation approaches, the HED algorithm increases the volume of donated energy, providing a more effective means to address energy poverty. Experiments were conducted on a dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results showed that HED increased the total donated energy by at least 0.43% (64 megawatts) compared to the other algorithms (UG2D, P2D, and P2PD). © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.