Distributed Ledger Technologies for Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading

Abstract

The increasing integration of prosumers and smart metering devices into the energy distribution network, is transforming the traditional energy market to a community energy trading that requires peer-to-peer (P2P) interactions. Such P2P interactions result in complex data exchanges among prosumers, utility grid, and market operators. This inevitably introduces control complexity, security, and privacy challenges in the existing power system. The application of distributed ledger technology (DLT) has seen an increase in solving security challenges in the power network, specifically, in P2P energy exchanges. Thus, this study explores different DLT structures including blockchain and IOTA usage in energy P2P trading. A smart contract for managing trust and transactions is designed and implemented on IBM hyperledger fabric platform. In addition, we evaluated the performance of interconnected internet of things devices for energy transactions with IOTA protocol, which uses the directed acyclic graph as its DLT structure, against the Ethereum-based blockchain structure. It is shown that the end-to-end transaction delay with the IOTA DLT is lower than the Ethereum-based DLT implementation.